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

In my business, it wasn’t so long ago that a request from a client would take weeks to fulfill. We had to write computer programs and send away for the mainframe computer tapes to extract the information needed. Then a mistake would be made, and it had to happen all over.

Or in another job, I wanted information from some governmental entity, and we could go round and round for weeks before they sent us a disk.

Nowadays, we can do all that in ten minutes, thanks to the internet. And thanks to the internet, we have faster access to so much more stuff and so much more information, that I think we’ve become accustomed to being able to have things instantly.

I feel like when someone asks me a question—at work, or on fluther—I need to be able to answer it instantly. On fluther, it is rare that I go and research something, but when I do, I feel like I only have a short time frame before the research becomes irrelevant.

I don’t know. Does anyone else feel like this? Do you feel like things have changed drastically for you and there’s no time but this instant in order to get back to someone? If so, how does this affect your life?