Is progress progressive?

Maybe it started with the pandemic, but it probably goes farther back than that. As soon as some people got computers in their houses, the next thing you know, they were working from home, or possibly "working" from "home." If you get the point.

I'm sure that for administrative types and insurance offices and lots of sales jobs, working from home is just as good as working from an office, and the ability to pad around the house in your big fuzzy slippers while working is always a plus. And with pandemic restrictions easing, a lot of companies are telling people to get on back to their office or their cubicle now, and some are saying "Nah" to that. This in turn has sparked the "quiet quitting" movement, in which people are just not showing up to work, so take that, Mr or Ms Bigboss!

At the same time, computers and technology are not only teaming up to allow us to time shift, they are also letting us do things from far, far away. The Baltimore SUN newspaper is a good example. They have far fewer people on the staff now, and far fewer pages in the paper, less locally-originated reporting, not as many ads. It's a shame.

But to make ends meet, the paper, which used to be printed right on Calvert St, and then in Port Covington when the paper moved down there, is now printed in Delaware, which, as any schoolkid with a basic knowledge of East Coast Geography knows, is a whole 'nother state up the road from here. The paper, which used to be delivered to our front walkway by 6 AM, is now supposed to be here by 7, but rarely is. I can't blame the delivery people; they have to wait until the paper is trucked down here from another state, coming down I-95 with all the cigarette smugglers and narcotics dealers. Usually the paper is here around 8:30 or so, by which time I've watched the three network morning shows and my My Three Sons rerun. And of course since they need extra time to get the paper here, the baseball scores from the night before are never there, as they used to be.

Also, they say that the switching - the technical part of TV where they add the commercials and play the non-network shows, such as local news and infomercials, where people with British accents tell us how to get stains out of our clothes - for one of the local TV stations is being done out of town, in Indianapolis, for God's sweet sake. This would account for the dead air on that station, the gaps where nothing is heard and nothing is seen for 20 seconds or so.

People in Baltimore don't like Indianapolis. They stole our football team one dark night in 1984. Fortunately, in those days, the paper arrived on time, so I knew about it before the sun came up!