Reality can be of different types and today I had to realize I'm detached from reality in a certain way. You can have your own reality in your head, which can be real or just imaginary and there can be a totally different reality out there that you face, when you go somewhere you've never been before.
This morning I had to take care of some official business that my dad has outsourced to me because he had no patience to take care of it earlier this week. I showed up at the office right at the opening hour as I've been told there will be a crowd later, so I thought let's get this done and over with in the morning and have the rest of the day for other tasks as wasting time in waiting rooms is not something I enjoy.
The minute I opened the office door and looked around, the emergency bell in my head started to ring, which is hardly ever wrong. I had a feeling that things are not going to go as smoothly as I am used to and in a few minutes I got the confirmation that my first impression was right.
Imagine an office, where time has stopped decades ago. There were two desks almost as old as my poor self, covered with waxed canvas, but the most concerning thing that made the emergency bell ring in my head was the lack of computers. Where there's no 21st century IT equipment, things may not go as planned. There was one laptop, turned back to the lady, which served to play music aired by the local radio station 😳
After greeting the two ladies in the office, I stated my business and one of them started to tell me about the process to follow in order to get the documents I needed. There was a fee to pay, which I was aware of, but not the amount, so when the lady told me how much I have to pay, I knew I didn't have that much cash in my wallet. So I asked if I can pay by card, which was kind of funny as how could they have a POS when there were no computers, right? Lucky me, the bank was at 3 minutes walk, so I went quickly to the ATM to get some cash.
When I got back, things went smoothly, if I don't count the time I spent waiting for the nice lady to fill out a few forms, register my request to a couple of registers, write and stamp the receipt by hand, create and write a member ID by hand, glue the photo on it and so on.
While waiting for the documents to be ready, I could not take my mind off the situation. All I could think of was how easy it would be to handle matters digitally. This was a non profit organization, so obviously money is tight, otherwise the office would have looked differently, but we live in the digital era, where connecting to the world has to happen one day, rather sooner than later.
We're used to dealing with things digitally for the obvious reasons and we are also in the business of supporting and building a decentralized future. Once you see the advantages, it's hard to go back. Yet, the world that these two ladies were working in, looked like an other universe.
On Hive we make transactions that take seconds and can reach almost every corner of the world, every single day. We have decentralized finance systems, smart contracts, NFT's, liquidity pools, you name it. The world is moving towards a cashless society which can be CBDC but we hope it's going to be crypto. El Salvador is a good example for that and not the only one.
When I started my post I wanted to prove how detached I am from reality, because not knowing such offices exist, but while writing it, I had to realize that most likely the ladies are detached from reality too as most likely they don't know what we are doing in crypto or where the world is heading. Or better yet, how many realities are there? I guess the answer is not so simple.
The good thing in all this story is that this is an exception, I mean there are not many offices like this and if this one would have been of major importance, things would have been very different.
When basic things are lacking and things are turning from bad to worse, frustration can reach unimaginable levels, yet these two ladies were as nice and helpful as humanly possible.
Basically this is neither rant, nor complaining, I just wanted to write this down as I think we all go through something similar.
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