Richard Smedley
Senior IT Technician (2016–present)Nov 27
For a British person who has traveled to the United States, which technological advances impressed you the most?
I was genuinely fascinated; my journeys to the United States have been nothing short of time travel.

My girlfriend ordered us a delivery pizza by picking up a landline phone and calling the pizza place, and when the guy showed up she paid him with a cheque. (Yes, really… in 2017.)

We went into a (rural) bank where the tellers were using computers with amber monitors and a typewriter was visible in the back office.

I put my card in an cash machine to withdraw some money but the machine wouldn’t give me any money because it didn’t recognise my “non-domestic” card. (I use my card regularly all over the world without problems… but in America it’s randomly rejected about 50% of the time. Even in Disney World. Even in a bloody bank, I couldn’t withdraw cash from my bank account. But for some reason I can fo it just fine in Japan, Turkey, Switzerland, Canada, France, Belgium, Germany, The Netherlands, and so on.

The internet connection in her house rarely exceeded 5mbps and went down frequently.

On the second day, a local madman shot down the local phone mask over a dispute with the phone company over his bill, and we had to drive into town to make a simple phone call.

When I returned to England and our relationship became necessarily long distance, we could never video chat because the internet was so bad - eventually my girlfriend would drive up to her parents house closer to town (half an hour away) just to get a signal, and we would just about manage to hold a conversation.

The technology in America may have impressed me if I’d time-travelled from 1935. But, as it turned out, I found it a massive disappointment and marked step down in comparison to any other country I’ve been in.