I vacillate between being a
traditionalist afraid of the future and being an early adopter of
technology. I bought the first model of Apple Macintosh computer ever
sold but I don’t have a cell phone. I’m a writer, not a talker. I’m not
on Facebook, don’t know how to tweet and I have no idea what Instagram
is. I don’t do my banking online, have never got a dime out of an ATM
machine and I know the names of every teller in the bank we’ve been
loyal to through four ownership changes.
I
feel guilty because I’ve bought a few things on Amazon that I could
have purchased from local merchants but I shouldn’t feel that way
because the hardware store in town practically begs you to shop on their
web page.
You can’t be like me any
more and I should know better. I got a good lesson on what happens to
people and companies who refuse to periodically overhaul and remodel. I
was 21 years old and got a job as the “manager” of a registered Angus
herd. Actually, I was just a hired hand. The man I worked for refused to
be receptive to new ideas. His cattle were terrible and he was still
breeding the type that were really short and low set, so much so that if
he would have ever won a class at a cattle show and a photo would have
been in the livestock press you would have been able to see all the belt
buckles of the big shots standing behind the animal. But he didn’t have
to worry about that because the odds of his cattle winning anything in a
showring were the same odds the bull has in a Tijuana bullring.
I
tried to convince the owner that he should make use of my talents as an
artificial inseminator but “By, God, my daddy bought his herd bulls out
of a range bull sale and if it was good enough for him then it’s good
enough for me.”
I almost got killed on
numerous occasions because I had to feed a big pen full of bulls that
ranged in age from yearlings to four year old bulls we couldn’t sell. I
had to feed them with numerous fifty pound sacks of feed in open troughs
in the middle of the pen. And did I mention the bulls had a wicked
strain of blood that made them man killers. I asked if I couldn’t build
some feed bunks like they have in feedlots so I could feed from outside
the pen but the owner said, “No. We’ve never done it that way before and
it would cost too much money.”
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