Let
us assume that you have been dragged, as I have, kicking and screaming into a
world dominated by gadgets. Cyberspace. The virtual world. A Strange Land.
Unless
you live in a convent or go to extraordinary lengths to isolate yourself, it is
barely possible any more to get by without a computer or a mobile telephone. In
addition to this, your automobile, clocks, printer, electronic reader, sewing
machine, kitchen range, coffee maker, television and microwave all operate on
some kind of computer system which may (and usually does) go wrong. The sewing
machine, for instance, must not get below 50 degrees Fahrenheit or the computer
will not work until it is warmed up again.
New
gadgets will appear minute by minute, and the pressure is on for you to have
the most recent versions of the various gadgets.
There
are manuals to all these things. They are filled with errors and flat-out
misstatements and are sometimes only available on line, which is not much help
when it is your computer which is acting up. There are also help lines
available by telephone; good luck. If you are very patient and your computer is
still working, you may be able to get a chat window where a person in a distant
land will eventually politely offer to assist you. It is the prepositions which
give these people away. They do not know that “in the wireless gateway” is
quite different from “on the wireless gateway.”
The
vocabulary for all the devices is ever-changing and non-standardized. Waiting
in the electronics section of a department store, we asked the clerk “What do
you call the device which records from the television. It isn’t a VCR any more,
we know.”
“Oh,
you mean a DVR,” the clerk replied.
“O.K.,”
we said. “Can we buy one of those?”
“No,”
he replied. “That’s only available from your cable company.”
Clue:
Most of the gadgets are known by initials. Nobody knows what the initials stand
for.
Add
this to your list of things obvious to natives of the Strange Land but maybe
not to the rest of us: When entering letters on your new telephone handset
(just purchased, because the expensive three-month-old telephones were not
compatible with the new wireless gateway): Each number on the keypad (where you
punch in the phone numbers) has three or four associated letters. Say you would
like to have the airport taxi number on your quick-dial. To enter the first of
these letters, press once. To enter the second of these letters, press two. So
if you want to enter “cab”, you press three times, then one time, then two
times. You may have to manually move the insertion point, but then maybe not.
Something so obvious nobody would dream of mentioning it. The way “a space is a
character” came as a computer typing revelation when somebody told you about it
off-handedly.
Your
friends do not want to help you with this. It’s just the way they got tired of
helping you move the piano in the old days. They figure if they had to suffer
through useless manuals and unending bad music while being on hold for the help
lines, you can jolly well do your own suffering.
Clue:
Sometimes turning everything off and starting over will work. Or you can do as
the teenagers do and just try anything which occurs to you until something
works. You may, however, have to get a technician to re-install your system if
you get too wild.
I
got my first computer because I wanted e-mail. The computer stayed in the box
for a week because I was afraid to hook it up. I joined Facebook because I
wanted to find out what my grandchildren were doing. But you see what a
slippery slope the Strange Land can be.
“You
are like your brother Les,” Nicodemus says. “You like your gadgets.”
“I
do not like the gadgets,” I answer. “I can’t figure out how to do without them,
is all. And you don’t want anything to do with them.”
“Yes,
well,” he says.
“I’d
rather have two tin cans and a string,” I say, peevishly, trying to figure out
how Skype works so he can talk to his friend Michael in England. (The new
wireless gateway does not support 10-10-987 calls, which was the cheap way to
go when we had a land line.)
“I
used to talk to my friends with tin cans and a string,” he says.
“It
would have to be a really long string to reach to England,” I answer.
