It is true that “convenience” is not a verb, not even an intransitive one. It might well be intransigent, though, in its subtle and unstoppable destruction of a society that once fostered kindness in our simple interactions with those who offered us a service.

            I begin with an anecdote from my earliest teaching days. As a new sessional lecturer in the English Department of the University of Saskatchewan back in the days before personal computers sprouted in every office, I was deeply grateful—almost every day—to the secretarial staff in the department office. I told them which textbooks I wanted to use, and they ordered them for me, made sure that I got a free desk copy for my own use, and submitted the list to the bookstore. How that all happened, I don’t know. I do know that we discussed my choices, and I was reassured that all would be well. And it was so. I was free to prepare the actual teaching.

 Near the end of the term, I submitted my typed copy of the final exam (some faculty turned in hand-written copies) to the secretaries for transformation into officially printed copies. Once I had finished marking the final exams, I filled in students’ final grades into the paper form supplied by the secretaries and then received by them. How those grade numbers arrived in the Administration Building was not my affair. I could pay attention to whatever student issues came up, such as deferred exams or questions about the next term.  

 Less than a decade later, during which I did the course work for my doctoral degree, I began teaching again, this time for a different college. I was informed, crisply, that I had to contact book publishers myself for any desk copies I needed, and I was responsible for sending my text list to the book store. After all, everyone now had her/his own computer and email address and could “conveniently” make whatever arrangements were necessary. Besides, the lone secretary in the office had many instructors to deal with and couldn’t be expected to provide that kind of service.

If I had thought that having to order my own books was a nuisance (yes, I know this smacks of privilege), that was because I hadn’t yet discovered that I was now also responsible for submitting grades directly to the Administration Office, using whatever software program had been designed for that exam period. My last phrase is deliberate: seemingly every time I had to submit grades, whether at Christmas or in late spring, the program had been changed and I had to learn a new interface. Hours and hours in the busiest season of academia were spent attempting to figure out what miniscule error I might have made that prompted the computer program to refuse my submission yet again. I thought about the hundreds of faculty on campus, each one sitting alone in front of a computer screen, swearing helplessly because the IT department had imagined that more “upgrades” were needed.

I will spare my readers the details of the day that my word processing program was updated, without prior notice, just as I was in the midst of writing a conference paper, with the deadline looming. For one entire awful afternoon, I couldn’t figure out how to access any of my files. I wished all kinds of horrible disasters upon the tech people responsible for my terror that I had lost all of the work of the previous weeks. Which one of them, I wondered, would submit willingly to have some stranger enter their home in their absence and rearrange, totally and irrevocably, their entire kitchen with all its contents—dishes, food stuffs, appliances? Would they not protest such a violation of their space in the name of “convenience”? Yet we poor, un-technically minded teachers and researchers had to submit not only to the monumental inconvenience of learning how to manage a new program but also to subtle implications that we were foolishly resisting progress or that we simply weren’t very clever.  

            I am grateful beyond measure to be retired now and freed from the tyranny of supposedly convenient technological enhancements to the act of teaching.

            Unfortunately I am still repeatedly learning helplessness because of the illusory goal of convenience. And here I move from the classroom to the city street. As a farm girl, I had learned how to parallel park using strategically placed straw bales (the small rectangular ones, not the humungous ones that now dot the prairie). What was much easier to learn was how to pay for downtown parking in the big city.  

Every car I ever drove, for decades, had a coin purse readily available. Putting coins in a meter was simple, even on cold winter days. Discovering that someone else had left time on the meter was delightful. If a meter was stuck and refused to accept more coins, that was not a problem for me. The meter reader would discover that malfunction before issuing a ticket.

Such simplicity is now gone. I still remember the day when I, now newly retired, planned to meet a friend on campus for coffee and discovered that new parking meters required me to use my phone to pay. There was no slot for coins. I did have a cell phone by that time, but it wasn’t yet a “smart phone.” And if I had had a smart phone, I doubt that I would have been equally smart in its use. I had no choice but to get back into my car, drive away to some neighbouring residential street that still had free parking and then walk back several blocks, now late for my meeting.

            I knew, at some intellectual level, that getting older would have disadvantages and that I would face an accumulation of losses. I had not reckoned with the soul-destroying helplessness that would accompany seemingly minor losses. Because the relentless drive for “convenience” (don’t ask for whose) inevitably eliminates personal interactions (think about the soullessness of online shopping or the maddening experiences of self-checkouts), the helplessness felt by the left-behind people is all the more acute. It’s one thing to have to ask someone for help. It’s another to find oneself alone with no one around to ask for help. No one, that is, except a disembodied voice from another country who finally speaks to me after I have listened through several menus and pushed numbers on my phone. And then I may not even be able to understand that disembodied voice.

 If I once imagined that the elder years would be spent thinking about huge questions about meaning and focusing on deepening relationships, I have been disabused. We are instead called upon, repeatedly, to learn new technology in order to accomplish once simple tasks. I don’t even want to contemplate what it will be like to try to negotiate complex health issues when every institution has been incorporated into some rats’ nest of online documentation. All that “convenience” of being able to book an appointment online (instead of speaking directly to a kindly receptionist) comes at a high cost.

I suppose that I can look forward to hiring a young person with some suitable training to be my personal guide through the coming, hyper-convenient world. Oh, wait, that won’t be a young person, will it? It will doubtless be a robot, of inscrutable age.

“Convenience and efficiency are not virtues: efficiency is a tool to make money, and convenience lures us into spending it, often foolishly and for no good purpose.”