"Takes a long time"

The Wall Street Journal ran an article about mining genealogical databases online that was forwarded to me by a friend. Of all things, one of the criticisms was that "it took a long time" to check through the various databases to find his ancestor, with a less common surname and a birth and death date. I wanted to laugh out loud! A few hours online to check Family Search, Ancestry, the Ellis Island database and the Jewish Genealogy database is nothing like the weeks, months and years that this process would have taken in the past! Remember scrolling through unidexed census pages for hours and hours? Remember typing letters to distant cousins hoping for a reply to fill in a missing name or date?

Perhaps this is one more piece of evidence supporting the "fast convenience generation" that lives and works with us today. If they can't get what they want in a few minutes, their attention is lost and they get frustrated. Why can't people be happy with the technological advances that have been made, making our research hours ever so much easier than they were even five years ago?!