How has the "I want it now" phenomenon affected your life?

I had a client that always, no matter what, wanted every single job right that minute and always never told me about the job until it was on deadline.

Despite my charging him rush fees, he never learned.

I felt like it was a power trip—that he did it because he could.

Don’t forget the I want it all part too… I want it all, and I want it now!

Yeah I’ll admit it, slow drivers piss me off because I like to arrive to my destinations as fast as I can. Can’t everyone go at least 10 over?

I feel that pressure crunch all the time now. We get less inbound phone calls now and my e-mail load seems to double every year!!

I just point and laugh when he says that ;)

It has affected us all; we want to press enter in all aspects of our lives and get immediate results.

It does affect me, directly – I am so much less patient – if the computer takes longer than instantaneously I get angry – if the cell phone doesn’t work someplace, I get angry…this is a GQ

I always feel like I am late to answering question on fluther. By the time I get to a question the party seems pretty much over.

In life, I easily think I will forget my thought if I don’t say it right now! This has lots to do with my ADD. I practice waiting, but ugh, it is hard!

I’ve been aware of this expectation in most of us and keep it in my awareness at all times. I remind myself constantly, every time I start to get impatient over a slow DL, or a line in the store, or traffic, whatever. I find that I stress out a lot when I lower my expectation of “right now.” When one steps back and looks at it, we’re being ridiculous. Think of how long things took just ten years ago. Twenty years. We managed to survive the waits for things then, didn’t we?
I allow people the luxury of waiting to hear back from me. Of course, I don’t allude to items of business, but I try to give people realistic expectations.
And I refuse to allow another person’s rush to ruin my day. I just get out of their way and go on about my own day.

I was totally amazed the last time we bought a used car. We were with the dealer for about three hours and walked out with a car, which hubby drove home, while I drove our ‘other’ car, and we hadn’t paid one cent for it, it was all on credit and the first payment wasn’t for another 45 days.

Nah, waiting will always be a part of our life.
We wait for everything, even when we don’t know it.

I do my tax returns by Internet, yet I still wait forever for the refund to arrive…it doesn’t always have to be this way though.

Once, I got my bank card duplicated somehow, and lost all my money. I had to go to the bank to deal with this, so they would give me back the cash, but they said that the investigation would take like a month…I can’t wait this long. I got rent and bills and shit to pay.

So everyone looked at me and I created silence among the clients, but after yelling that I was gonna scrap my account and just go to another bank, everything was solved in the following two hours.

We wait alla time, but we don’t always have to. Either way though, Fluther can wait, when things like that happen.

If all else fails, that’s why I have an answering machine. I’m 27, so I probably appear old fashioned since you can’t even find actual answering machines in stores anymore, but damn it, if I’m stressed all the time on the account of people waiting for me, I’ll be dead in no time.

[Question nswered in 0,7 seconds.]

I prefer delayed gratification.

I’m out of that rat-race now. My remaining years will be a conscious rejection of the speeded up “want it now” world. I now live a rural agricultural life, in tune with the seasons. A human pace and scale. I lived at the beck and call of others for 30 years, now the world around me will operate at my pace. I don’t need or want instant anything. Anyone who wants to impose any such thing on me can now kiss my posterior.

@stranger_in_a_strange_land: But what about that pesky mother nature who has turned on the sap in the local maple trees?

@gailcalled I fired up the evaporator yesterday afternoon. We thought we were ahead of schedule, now we’re behind. No rushing though, I don’t want any more injuries. The sugar content of this early sap is fairly low (about 1.2% rather than the “normal” 2–2.5%). We’ve provessed about 2 gallons of syrup now. At peak season we’ll be making about 25 gallons a day. If the snow gets worse, I’m calling everyone in, just flurries right now. This year the mid-Atlantic states are getting what we are used to getting. We’re not getting the hard freezes at night to set off the good sap runs yet.

@stranger_in_a_strange_land How many trees do you tap? Do you run the plastic tubes around? Or use buckets?

@wundayatta We’re tapping 520 trees on our own land and processing sap for two neighbors. Our taps are connected to plastic tubing, which then lead to 1½” PVC pipes. We then draw a vacuum on each main pipeline, which empties into intermediate tanks. From those, the sap is pumped to a main tank. The main tank feeds into a reverse osmosis unit that concentrates the sap by a factor of 2–3 (this is to save firewood). The concentrates feed into one of two evaporators through a pre-heater. The whole process reduces the sap volume by a factor of about 40:1. The syrup is then filtered and drummed for delivery to the co-op. Last year we processed about 20,000 gallons of sap to make 500 gallons of syrup.

We have one tap line running now (the snowstorm is delaying the final work on the other two lines). I fired the small evaporator yesterday and made our first two gallons of the season, a pretty decent Light Amber Grade A.

The only trees we use buckets on are the two huge maples in front of the old homestead (now a womens center). We do this just out of tradition, It also helps to gauge the sap run.

Can you save me some Grade A Fancy? I usually ask one of the farmers from the market to give me a gallon. Otherwise it’s hard to get anything but Grade B.

I was lucky enough to learn a bit about it when I was a kid. We had about 8 trees, and we had many adventures making syrup (including steaming the drywall off the kitchen walls). I think we got between one and two gallons per year.

For the last several years around here, spring came and stayed right after winter. Trees were blooming instantly. But this year, I noticed it was freezing at night and just over freezing in the day, and I realized it would be an excellent time to start tapping the trees and a big sense of nostalgia came over me.

I’ve always wanted it now myself. I think it’s part of our greedy human nature. I embrace it less now that I’m old, but I indulge it for my child.

One way to learn patience is to get pregnant.

@gailcalled Please find another way. :)

@thriftymaid: Thanks for the optimism. My daughter will be 45 next week so the irritation of the last four weeks of being pregnant is just a memory (but a powerful one. “Get this baby out of me.”)