Nearly everything we take for granted today could be considered high-tech, especially when looked at from the perspective of the past. When my siblings and I were young, our summers were spent outside playing with all of the neighborhood kids from dawn to dusk. We ate at whichever friend’s house we were closest to, and we went home when the streetlights came on. If our mom needed anything in particular from us during the day, she’d stand out on the back porch and blow a garden-variety referee’s whistle. We didn’t have any way of knowing which one of us she wanted; we all simply knew we had to get home when we heard Mom’s whistle.

The notion that our mom could have personally contacted us with a phone that we could carry in our pockets would have been straight out of The Jetsons. The fact that the same little portable phone could deliver messages via voice and/or text, take photos, and access the Internet (wait, there was no such thing)—would have literally blown our little minds.

Humor me for a second: swivel your head to the left, and then to the right. How many objects are in your line of sight that were simply unheard of 20 years ago? From the PCs and laptops we depend on at work to the multi-functional TVs we relax in front of at night—and everything in between—we live in a truly amazing age. Now consider how many of these “high-tech” devices are held together (at least in part) by adhesives or protected by sealants. It really is mind-boggling to consider just how pervasive adhesives and sealants are in our daily lives—and how necessary.

 The community will come together next month at the Adhesive and Sealant Council’s Fall Convention and Expo in Greenville, S.C. I can’t wait to see all of the new technologies that will help make the high-tech world of tomorrow a reality.