Brave New World or Two of These Things Now Go Together

You will think I'm ridiculous, but I feel like the first man to walk on the moon. Or maybe like I've just taken my first ride in one of those newfangled auto-mobiles. Or like Alexander Graham Bell when his telephone worked.

I'm blogging on a bus.

Now this is probably a huge so what for most of you. You've been dragging your laptops around to cafes for years. You have an iPad. An iPhone. You probably Twitter (an unfortunate habit, in my opinion). But understand that this is new turf for me.

I resisted computers for as long as I could. We actually rented our first one from an outfit I can no longer recall and which is undoubtedly defunct - but the deal was you rented the computer and after a couple of years you owned the out of date piece of junk. We kept it for years.
I just went to a flat screen monitor three years ago. Laptop? I still don't own one - but my daughter just gave me her old Macbook Pro and here's where it gets incredible (to me).

I had to go to New York City today. It's a two and a half hour bus ride and it's pretty boring. So, I think to myself, why not bring the laptop? Maybe there'll be a wireless signal, maybe there will be an outlet (her batteries are fried beyond replacing), and if not, I can sit at a Starbucks and look like everybody else for awhile. Damned skippy.

But what to my wondering eyes should appear as I take a seat on the faithful Trailways bus, but an outlet. Two of them, in fact. One for each seat. And it gets better. When I fire up Gideon, as my daughter named this machine, a little message comes up asking me if I'd like to access the wireless remote network "Trailways". The bus has its own wireless signal!!!

So I am, at this very moment, speeding up the New York State Thruway, a young man in the seat in front of me snoring quietly, a woman across the way reading The New Yorker and eating her fourth snack of the trip (she's a small woman - but she's obviously hungry), and I am typing away on the Intergalactic NetWeb!

This is innovation beyond my wildest dreams. This is future shock.

It's not perfect. The bus shakes so much that the ac adapter periodically falls out of the socket and the screen goes black. The Model A wasn't perfect, either. But it was a big switch from the horse and buggy. And rather than staring out the window, which I do plenty of, thank you, I can sit here and blather on to you, my hapless readers. Until you move on to the next blog.

But isn't it amazing that a person in a bus seat can actually communicate with the entire world?
I wonder if we realized what a revolution computers would be...and we need only look at Egypt to know it now - computers started a revolution there!

Does it have to be this complicated?

DISCLAIMER: This is a rant brought on by my extensive exposure to technology this weekend. There's no Buddhist calm here whatsoever.


I am on the verge of Luddism. I am sick of technology, sick of convenience, sick of things that make my life "easier". They deliver - but at a price.

1. Let us begin with the cell phone. It's a terrific thing - particularly if you're lost in a scary place or your pre-teen daughter wants to roam the mall with her buddies without you. That, for me, is where it ends.
It has become an appendage, it makes us accessible no matter where we are - and people expect us to answer, damn it.
It's transformed many jobs into 24/7 nightmares because we're always hooked in, always accessible. Time off has become something that means "I'm not at my desk, but you can reach me."
Kids now text rather than talk. They prefer it. Explain to me what the world will become now. Tell me how it's a good thing.

2. Television. It's held sway over us for two generations, maybe three now? It's slowly dying thanks to the computer (that's next) but it's still screaming at us. It began with variety shows, comedy, song and silly sit coms, many of which were live. It is now bloated with not only canned, mindless games shows and sit coms with laugh tracks that make my ears bleed, but reality shows that make me want to find a mountaintop cave where I can move in and pull a stone across the entrance. It is content made to fill the space between the ads.
And the ads! They're loud, they're long and they sell to a society that I cannot believe is really ours, though it must be. I was sick yesterday and sat on the couch for several hours flipping through Saturday morning television. That used to belong to the kids when I was young. Yesterday I found two cartoons - the rest were either selling something or trying to make me enough of a voyeur to sit still until the next ad: perky people encouraged me to exercise with them, perky people tried to sell me hair product, a girdle for my entire body, serious actors tried to solve a bloody crime, naked people speaking Spanish were arguing in bed - when I flipped back there was a woman in a sexy waitress costume and a strange midget man dressed in a clown suit. There were Christians pitching Christ, business experts pitching investment, political experts pitching policy. Then there were the ads: drugs to improve my sex life, drugs to make me lose weight, drugs to handle the diabetes caused by eating too much, fast food at a bargain price, drugs for the cardiac disease caused by fast food...my stomach, already iffy, heaved.

3. Computers. They've revolutionized our world. We can see all over the world, learn anything we want, even share what we know. We can email anyone who has an email address. We have Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, Tumblr, blogs (like this one), MySpace and I don't know what else...there are a gazillion ways to communicate our no doubt very important and serious thoughts (like these) to the world. We LOVE to communicate. Particularly if the only feedback is "like" or a short comment. We can find people, stalk people, block people - and never leave our chairs. We're switching books to computers, music to computers, our entertainment to computers. We now are supposed to exercise with computers - hey, video games are good for you - the whole family can watch a screen and exercise together!

Automated Teller Machines (did you remember that's what ATM stands for?) replace dealing with people, problem solving, getting necessary things done within business hours. 24/7 banking. 24/7 gasoline. 24/7 customer service. 24/7 restaurant food. The world is so freaking convenient that no one ever has any time off.

It is ten of nine on a Sunday morning. I am taking time off. I am turning off my computer and going for a walk. It is cold. It is sunny. Wherever you are, you should try it.

Technophobia

I never wanted to get a computer. I suspected it was not advancement at all, but a new "convenience" that would prove to be far more trouble than it was worth. But we wouldn't figure it out until we were so used to it that it was too late to get rid of it.

I was so right.

I have replaced sound cards, talked through geek sessions as some stranger across the country took control of my computer and tried to figure out why it hated me.
I've watched people link two computers together, switching back and forth as they transferred information from one to another.

I've watched my Handsome Significant Other, generally a sweet and gentle man, turn into a raving lunatic as the technology in his studio burps, rattles or wheezes and refuses to show him why.

And this week, I seriously considered tossing my computer out a second story window.

I woke and went to my office, prepared to go to work, and discovered that I couldn't get online. Not at all. I'm working at home temporarily, and my computer is on a network with HSO's downstairs. I don't like to mess with his stuff...he's a Mac guy and I've got a PC and I might get PC cooties on his cool computer. But he was fast asleep, having been working most of the night.
So I plowed ahead because without a computer and an online connection, I cannot work.

I don't get newspapers - I read them online. I type scripts, voice stories and do interviews all through my computer, then use the internet to feed them to the station's ftp site. It's all smoke, mirrors and remote magic. But there was no magic at my house and suddenly I was stopped cold.

First, I had to call my internet provider, Time Warner Cable. I have learned the secret of their automated operator....when she insists on calmly walking me through a repair instead of letting me talk to a human, I say "customer representative." Those two words are like "alakazam!"...they silence the recorded assistant and she meekly connects me. Or she used to.

Time Warner has caught on. Now when I said "customer representative!" her response was a placid, "Well, I realize you want to speak with a customer representative, but I think we should continue. I think we're on our way to solving your problem."

She THINKS? Really? Now THIS is innovation.

Well, I got past her with a second "CUSTOMER REPRESENTATIVE!" I don't know if it was what I said or how I said it. I know I wouldn't have wanted to talk to me anymore.

So I got a perfectly nice human, she told me to get on the floor, crawl behind the desk, pull out every plug I could find, run upstairs, turn off my computer, run back downstairs, turn the modem back on, then run around and cluck like a chicken until I ran out of breath. Okay. She didn't tell me to do that. But that's pretty much what I did.

And we determined, after 45 minutes, that the problem was the router.

That's the little box that enables us to both connect to the same internet cable. So I called work, explained what was going on, apologized profusely, and drove half an hour to the nearest store that carried such things.

Most of the ones they had were wireless. Apparently they don't want us to use wires anymore.
I'm not going for that one, thank you. You already roped me into this computer thing. That's enough for me.

I came home and had to wake up HSO. The new router had an installation CD and I couldn't figure out how to open up the CD disc tray on the Mac. I felt pretty awful waking him out of a sound sleep, but I was way late and I honestly didn't want to install a damned thing on his computer without him knowing about it.

He stumbled downstairs, looked at the wreckage that used to be his office, looked back at me and just said, "Really?" I apologized again.

So not only does it turn out that the Mac didn't need the CD...there's a key to open that tray right on the keyboard, though it's not marked in any way that I might recognize. Golly, those Macs are so darned intuitive.

So HSO got the new router up and running, we both were miraculously back on the internet, I thanked him profusely and ran upstairs to go back to work.

And then the printer went on the fritz.

That second story window is looking really good right now. Just don't know if it'll be the computer or me flying out of it.