Connected, clicking and screaming, to computer age
It's 1970. I'm in the eighth grade, and my teacher leads us across the street to the high school where the math department is showing off the school's first computer! It's this huge, clunky piece of metal, about the size of a dining room sideboard. We take turns firing the animated cannon, trying to calculate the geometry of angle and velocity so as to hit the target.
When I say "animated," I mean literally a stick-figure, outline drawing. And it doesn't go "boom," because there is no audio yet on computers.
As I trudge back to the grade school with my classmates, I distinctly remember shrugging off the experience because I would grow old and die before I ever had to learn anything about computers. I believed this deeply and, I thought, rationally.
Time ticked by. In college, I received a manual typewriter as a gift. Remember the shift key for making capital letters? The one where, using only the strength of your little finger, you had to lift the entire carriage and spindle? And Lord help you if you made a mistake. Correction fluid was invented in 1951 by Bette Nesmith, nine years after she and her husband invented Mike Nesmith, lead guitar player for the fictional television pop band The Monkees. But Bette's son got to my television in Phoenix years before Liquid Paper would make it to the dorm rooms of Northern Arizona University.
In graduate school, 1979, I was in heaven with my first electric typewriter, the IBM Selectric! It had the little silver interchangeable balls with different fonts. And Liquid Paper was my constant friend. Who knew the fumes were a psychoactive inhalant! And here I thought it was the Holy Spirit who inspired those theological tomes I wrote late into the night.
I acquired my first home computer in 1987. Huge heavy thing sitting under an even heavier monitor the size of a beach ball. It had a bay for a floppy disk. The word processor had those ghastly, glowing white letters on the blue screen background. It's a wonder we all didn't go blind.
I first went online in the mid-'90s. Sent my first email. Became Internet savvy in the later '90s. Acquired my first inkjet color printer. Got a flatscreen monitor in 2007. A laptop in 2009, along with my first wireless router. Now my world is perfect. I can write. I can communicate. Turns out I didn't die before I had to integrate computers into my life. Now I'm utterly dependent upon computers -- socially and professionally.
I'm still committed to dying before I know how computers work. I just want them to work. So, when my computer recently stopped working, life as I know it was paralyzed.
Took my laptop in. Cost $55 to be told my laptop was fine but that wireless routers sometimes crash. Called CenturyLink. Grew old trying to get through the "decision tree" automated voice response to an actual human being. Bought a new wireless router/modem combination. Followed the directions with meticulous care. No-go. Called the customer service number. Grew old waiting for someone to answer. Then spent three hours with Lonnie. Or Bonnie. Or Ronnie. Still don't know this nice woman's name. She answered my call from somewhere in the Philippines with an accent so thick I caught only every fifth or sixth word. Timmy had an easier time understanding Lassie when she was barking.
"Awl watt poryoo teebuhn," she would say. And I answered obediently, over and over, "What?"
By the third hour, I thought I would disintegrate into tears, like a little boy who's lost his mother at the mall, and whimper, "Ronnie, or Lonnie, or Bonnie, you seem like a nice woman, and I'm really glad you have a job, but talking to you makes me want to stick my index finger through my eye and into my brain."
Finally, I get a referral for a Computer Guy. He comes to my house. He calls the secret number where an actual person from CenturyLink answers on the second ring. They talk to each other in that iber calm of airline pilots and air traffic controllers. I'm mesmerized. I find myself wanting to ask Computer Guy to marry me. Instead I write him a check for $200. My computer was fine. My router was fine. My modem was fine. Somebody at CenturyLink had forgotten to reset some switch after a windstorm.
Ahh relief sweeps through me like a junkie just fixed, as if I can't remember a life worth living before the Internet.
Steven Kalas is a behavioral health consultant and counselor at Las Vegas Psychiatry and the author of "Human Matters: Wise and Witty Counsel on Relationships, Parenting, Grief and Doing the Right Thing" (Stephens Press). His columns appear on Sundays. Contact him at 227-4165 or skalas@reviewjournal.com.
