By TREVOR JACKSON
 Guest Columnist

Last week, I made a trip to Chicago. I’m studying theater, and I planned to go and audition for graduate schools. On Sunday, I woke up at the absolute crack of
dawn so I could drive with my father from Monmouth to PDX.

After the hour drive, 10 minutes to park, 10 minutes to walk to the terminal, and an additional hour of waiting in line (it happened to be Super Bowl Sunday), we approached the Alaska Airlines counter only to find that our flight had been canceled.

Fortunately, there was another flight in the next two days, and it wouldn’t conflict with my audition. But the situation was nonetheless extremely frustrating.

See, I still live in the 20th century, and I don’t own a smartphone. On the drive over, if I only owned some sort of smart device, I could have received the cancellation notice ahead of time and saved the trip. But alas, I had no such
device. And the ironic thing is, my father works for Verizon.

I decided to purchase for myself a Samsung Galaxy, a tablet computer with a 7-inch screen. Some people, like my father, believe they can be just as productive while “living-off-the-grid.” But let me tell you: as someone who has made a lifestyle switch in the very midst of the Age of Connectivity, there is no other way to live if you want to count yourself as a part of the American workforce.

Now, I know the audience I am writing for, and that, quite frankly, I’m preaching to the choir. I would wager that 99 percent of you, the readers, know the immediate benefits of being consistently connected to the internet. How fortunate it is the campus is covered in Wi-Fi signals.

To those that are wary about how predominant technology has become in our lives, I say “get over it.” Imagine working as a chef in a competitive kitchen, except you’re the only one that has to go cook everything in the fire pit out back. Meanwhile, I’ll stay inside with my industrial stovetop.