Kim Gaskill reflects on how kids today use Snap Map to wait until the absolute last second before catching the school bus, a stark contrast to the punctuality demands of previous generations.
It's a new day. I'm Kim Gaskill and this is the Daily Spark. Did you have to ride the bus to school when you were a kid? I did. Sitting here this morning drinking my coffee, watching the buses go up and down the street, and I'm thinking back to when I had to go stand out in the nasty weather waiting for the bus every morning. Now, we had to get out there early because they weren't on as tight a schedule as they seem to be now. They kind of came whenever they wanted to, so there was probably a 10-minute window. We always had to go out there and stand in the snowy, rainy, cold weather waiting for the bus. Now, I only lived about 5 miles from the school. But I lived kind of out in the country, so every, every one of the kids that I went to school with pretty much rode the bus except the kids who lived right in town. And this morning I'm watching the buses go by and my niece is standing there and she's looking at her phone watching the Snap Map on her phone. Now, Like I said, we had to go out early on the bus. But today, with technology, the way she knows when the bus is coming down the street, when she has to walk outside, she waits till the last second, watches the Snap Map of a friend who's on the bus, so she knows when it's coming up the road. And then she goes out there. Now, the other day she missed it. She just missed it by 10 seconds, probably. But that brings up a point of waiting to the last second to do things. Now, when I was a kid, like I said, we had to get out there early. You were always waiting outside when parents came to pick you up from a friend's house, or waiting 5 minutes or 10 minutes for the bus, or making sure you were outside the school if someone was coming to get you. You just were taught that you don't inconvenience someone else. You always make that extra effort to be out there early and be ready so that when someone comes by to get you or do something for you, they're not inconvenienced. Not today. They will wait till the last second. Do you do that? Do you wait until you absolutely have to go Or are you one of those people who gets out the door and gets to everything, shows up at events early, make sure you get to the movie and get a good seat? It's pretty much ingrained in us. If you're that kind of person, you do it with everything. If you're the kind of person that waits the last second or sets your clock 10 minutes ahead to make you think you have, you know, have to be out before you have to, so you're never late, that has actually been proven to be just the opposite. But things like that, and with the technology today, it just cracked me up that she used Snap Map to track her bus. So that she had to wait till the last second. It's like, "I'm not going out now because I'll have to stand there for a minute, and that would just be the most awful thing." Times sure have changed. Join me again tomorrow for another Daily Sparkle.
