by Mary Odden
The energy of our teen squad didn’t last, probably because some of us left town and none of us was Pete Brown. But the legacy of our squad and the many youngsters involved in medical rescue around the state should leave school officials and social workers with a few good ideas.
Arm the kids with trust and responsibility; let them work alongside caring adults ready to teach them and learn with them. Accept them as equals—and let the work be real. It’s the doorway to a productive adulthood. And it doesn’t hurt us older ones to pass through it too.
Thanks, Pete.
GADGETS
OOPS, SORRY ABOUT THAT GASLINE DEAL
I have an apology to make to Governor Palin and the people of Alaska. I’m not sure how to make amends for spoiling our chance at a gas line—all that time spent soliciting bids under AGIA (Alaska Gasline Inducement Act), all those hours the legislature spent in special session over the oil tax.
Actually, I’m not entirely certain which high level energy deal I ruined, but it must have been immense, maybe even national, judging from the reaction of the guy next to me in the check-out line at Fred Meyer.
There was a woman in Army fatigues in front of us, trying to buy something which did not have a price code tag. The check-out person was on the phone trying to describe the item to another store employee.
This took a long time, so the woman in the uniform and I had a couple of minutes to smile at each other. She smiled “sorry,” and I smiled back “no problem.” And I meant every crinkle. I’m from Nelchina, remember, and going to Fred Meyer is like going to Disneyland.
It was past supper time and there weren’t very many people in the south Anchorage store—only a few check-out lines open. It was just us and the Christmas decorations and all the different kinds of gum and candy and fake celebrity headlines.
The guy behind me on his cell phone was a dapper little man wearing athletic club sweats. He was younger than I am, which is becoming common.
I didn’t realize how important this fellow was until he hiked up the volume on his side of the conversation. Approximately 22” from my face, he fervently testified “Corpus Christi is the place” and “That doesn’t sound like a deal to me” and “Well, here’s what I’d tell him. . .” and “We’re not biting for that.” And so on.
I don’t know if this has ever happened to you. But in an airport, or a restaurant, someone comes near who is entirely encased in the bubble of his or her own life, his or her own business, which he or she is noisily conducting on a cell phone, perhaps through a little wire or bud which you cannot see, in which case he or she seems to be talking loudly to absolutely no one.
In such a situation, do not try to answer. You—seated with your book or trying to eat a café meal with your friends—are a piece of furniture in the grand corner office of the mind owned by the person on the phone.
Formerly happy with the sort of bovine contentment I feel when I’ve been buying groceries and looking at all the colorful fruit along with useless decorative things that I do not want to buy but enjoy as part of the joyous extravagance of American life, I started to feel uncomfortable in the check-out line there at Fred Meyer. The cell phone man’s conversation enveloped me like a gigantic amoeba.
I tried to get his attention by smiling at him, but his eyes looked right through me. I made outward pushing motions with the palms of my hands and smiled harder, thinking he’d all of a sudden realize that he was too close to me and move off a little to give me some air.
No reaction. The deal, it seemed, was reaching some kind of fiduciary fever pitch.
Well—in for a penny, in for a pound. I picked up my three pound tube of seven percent fat Fred Meyer brand lean ground beef and put it up to my ear. I leaned into the man’s face, which did not take much of a lean.
I said, “I am talking VERY LOUDLY ON MY GROUND BEEF.”
This did get a reaction, but not the one I’d hoped for. The man pried his gaze into focus and actually looked at me, a good start. But then he asked, with some hostility, “Do you have a problem?”
I said meekly, “I was wondering if you could move away a little.”
He did not move away. With a look of profound theatrical petulance he spoke these fateful words into his cell phone: “I have to hang up. I am annoying someone here.”
Then he holstered his phone and stood still as a statue, glaring down at his groceries. The Army woman got her groceries. I got my groceries and I said “Merry Christmas,” but only the check-out clerk said “Merry Christmas” back.
I know how it is when a stranger talks to you and you wonder for just a second if that person is insane and/or dangerous. Maybe the ground beef thing was a little over the top, and I am sorry about that and the very important conversation, too.
I know I can never make it up to the people of Alaska for the loss of that deal, whatever it was, but I do promise to think about the cell-phone man every time I pick up my own cell phone in the privacy of my magic bubble.
REACH OUT AND TOUCH SOMEONE
Fifty years ago, Sputnik 1 beeped its way across the sky and ushered in an age of fear and wonder.
Fifty years later, nothing short of Ouija boards is as uncertain as the electronic communications that bounce back at us from space. Now that phones are freed from walls, we are at the mercy of sunspots and roaming agreements. My computers and their satellite internet connections, upon which the newspaper-as-you-know-it takes form, are as mysterious to me as witching well water.
In spite of this, I am devoted to this current age and its gifts. I do not think we are necessarily going down the tubes. In fact, we haven’t seen a tube for a long, long time.
On the day of the first snow, the computer that contains every advertiser’s account information and every single one of our newspaper subscribers’ names and addresses told me that my virus definitions were out-of-date and the machine was at risk.
I take such warnings seriously. I tried to use the program that updates the virus definitions. No luck.
In the tradition of computer users everywhere, I performed the technically profound operation of turning the machine off, waiting thirty seconds, then turning it on again. No luck. Now I was really worried.
This is where the uncertainty part kicks in. Churchill called Russia “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” That’s because Churchill was born 75 years too early to have to try and find a phone number for customer support.
Three hours, 18 web pages, five support bulletins and two sweaty-palmed near-dives into the operating system of my computer later, I finally found a phone number and a “priority ID.” This promised me that if I could pry away the layers of voice mail there would be, like a pearl in the great program’s call center, a real person who would talk to me and fix my virus protection updating problem.
Her name was Nola. When she answered the phone, I became aware that I was talking with the other side of the world. She said, “Thank you for calling customer support. Can you describe the problem you are having?” This was spoken in upward curved musical syllables like a flute solo that hits a high note just before the end of each phrase.
“Are you in India?”
“Yes, in Mumbai.”
We began to work on my computer. I say “we,” but all I did was watch as Nola worked on Alaska from India and the little arrow pointed and clicked around my computer screen without me. It was ghostly, and it made me want to talk with the invisible agent of my cyber salvation.
“What is your weather like today?”
“The rainy season is about to end, and the warm season is coming.”
“What is your favorite season?”
Musical laugh: “I like the warm season very much.”
“It snowed here today. The snow will stay on the mountains now. Soon it’ll be white everywhere.”
“I have never seen snow.”
“I have never seen India.”
Another laugh in that different English. I asked her what time it was
—it was four-thirty in the morning in Mumbai and she had been at work just thirty minutes. She would work eight hours and then go home to her family. I wanted to know more about her family, but I felt like I’d already been nosey so I didn’t ask.
Nola reinstalled my anti-virus program, offered me an update to patch me up until the subscription runs out.
I wanted to talk some more. I asked her if she liked her job. She laughed again, “I have to, Mam.” I wanted to know what she meant, but didn’t ask. I told her she was good at her job, which was true but was also something we both knew already.
If somebody asks me do I like my job, I might say “well I have to,” but most of the time what I would mean by that is “yes.” By this point, I liked Nola of Whatchamacallit Company customer support very much and hoped that she meant “yes” when she said, “I have to.”
But I don’t know what she meant and won’t ever know because I didn’t ask. I might not have understood if she had tried to explain it, and anyway who am I to think that somebody needs fixing while they are fixing me? There were about 12,000 miles and change between me and the answer to that.
Nola said she could finish my computer fix without the phone connections, so I thanked her for her kindness and she thanked me for my patience and we said goodbye. The ghostly hand clicked around the programs on my screen for another 10 minutes, and at one point Nola needed me to take control of the mouse so that I could type “Okay.” Then she sent me a message on a white notepad that popped out of nowhere onto my screen.
These words typed themselves: “Are you there Mam?”
“I am here,” I typed back.
Thanks to Nola, and my computer, and Sputnik’s many children, those three words suddenly seemed as deep as the sky.
LUDDITE, A CLARIFICATION
I loved the word “Luddite” from the moment I first saw it, used by Alvin Toffler in his book The Third Wave. In that sequel to his blockbuster Future Shock, Toffler used the word to accuse some back-to-the-lander of high sociological treason for doing farming the hard way.
This made me annoyed at Toffler, so I immediately appropriated the word and applied it to myself as a badge of honor. I assumed it meant a person who has a moderate preference for time-intensive but quiet hand work over quick or noisy machine work.
Here’s my street cred for claiming the title: I once painted log preservative onto our two-story house with a two-inch brush, taking more than a week to do this—in order to not have to listen to a jackhammer paint pot and air compressor do the same job in about three hours. I am not claiming superior intelligence for this stubbornness, or superior health—I hung on a ladder and leaned over containers of noxious preservative the whole time.
I am also not claiming consistency. I love noisy chainsaws and all they do for us. I use a wood cook stove and a propane gas stove and a microwave. I love my highly technological virus and spyware checker which is, at the moment, sorting through 124,896 computer files—the usual morning computer housecleaning routine—so that I am able to send this newspaper file down to Karen Cline in Valdez, from whence her beautifully laid-out pages will flit through cyberspace to the waiting digital arms of the Frontiersman commercial printing service in Palmer.
Only then will the actual newsprint papers travel back to us—over the non-cyber highway—to receive hundreds of individual labels printed with the names of our subscribers, pressed onto each paper’s masthead by our grubby ink-stained fingers—the old slow way.
When I finally looked up the “Luddites” to find out who they were, about five years after appropriating their word, I found the real people a bit extreme but still representing a useful concept.
Between 1811 and 1813 in northern Britain, the Luddites, named after an imaginary angry person named Ned Ludd, ran around smashing new textile looms. The looms were an innovation because they could be operated by unskilled and thus cheap labor. The effect of these looms had been to eliminate a whole class of skilled textile artisans.
Certain skilled textile artisans were sufficiently teed-off to require the calming effects of small arms and artillery fire from the British Army, plus some nasty beheadings and one-way tickets to Australia.
In spite of a latent preference for David over Goliath, I don’t really identify much with the smashers. In our present world, there are left-wing smashers and right-wing smashers—people suspicious of any technology antithetical to their political interests. Famously, folks who drive metal stakes into trees to hurt loggers or blow up abortion clinics to prevent abortions don’t see anything contradictory about killing and maiming a few people while they show society how much they love animals or babies.
But the meaning of the word Luddite is still up for grabs, as is usual with words. The 19th century textile workers and their lost arts make me think of an Alaska Steamship Company oral history tape I listened to at the University of Alaska Fairbanks archive. Captain Erling Brastad was talking about the new navigational aids that came in after World War II.
Many of the old-time steamship pilots relied upon years of acquired knowledge, plus their terrific memories, skills and instincts to get the ships safely through the Inland Passage to and from Alaska.
Capt. Brastad, while also appreciating the safety that radar and other technologies brought to navigation, said he understood the sense of pain and loss the old-timers felt when their skills suddenly meant very little. He overheard one pilot say to another, with disgust, “Now ANYBODY can do this.”
Being a Luddite, minus the smashing of looms or laboratories, probably best describes people with a legitimate reluctance to give up detailed skills and knowledge acquired over a lifetime when the sudden swift sword of technology makes it obsolete. Not just people like me who don’t like noise or gadgets.
Farming with horses, navigating by stars, fixing eight-track tape players—those are all gone except among the few people who have found it important to bring those old skills back to life. More recent skills, maybe people driving their own cars, may someday pass out of the world. I bet that will make a few new Luddites.
GULLIBLE? ME TOO.
Okay, raise your hand if I have NOT crabbed at you for sending me an internet “forward” sometime in the last two months.
That’s what I thought—nobody.
For the record, Dr. Dobson is not trying to stop an atheist Madalyn O’Hair FCC Petition #2493 from banning all references to God and Christmas on the radio and the television program “Touched by an Angel.” Dr. Dobson, who may be weird but is not that weird, says he’s not involved. O’Hair, famous for getting the Supreme Court to ban organized prayer in schools in 1963, had nothing to do with the FCC petition.
In fact, she is dead.
The FCC petition, presented in 1974 and rejected by the FCC in 1975, did not have anything to do with banning religious broadcasting.
But the urban legend, circulated in hearsay and print and fax machine and now by internet, has been going around since 1975. That would be 23 years now.
I’ve received it two times recently, nearly 10 years into the twenty-first century.
Urban legend is a term for the kind of story which circulates anonymously, a usually false story riding on our very real fears and hopes. We used to tell these stories on street corners and at pajama parties. Fax machines once spread them, and now the internet is their primary habitat. Sometimes they show up in newspapers—remember the little old lady who put the poodle in her microwave to dry it off?
That didn’t happen. Or it didn’t happen the hundreds of times it has been reported.
Rarely, the stories are true. Wal-Mart did sell some flip flops from China that caused chemical burns. John McCain does tell a story about a POW who made an American Flag out of handkerchiefs and sewed it in his shirt.
There really are email and web page computer viruses, but many of the stories about them are false. The circulation of these stories depends on people believing “This is just out from Microsoft and Norton!”
&nb
sp; My favorite story about an email hoax is the young man who reported himself as missing—submitted all his personal information on a missing child alert form—and, as the Snopes debunking site says, “His prank escaped into the wilds of the internet.” His parents’ home was deluged with calls every day from all around the country from people who wanted to help find their missing son. That’s punishment enough, isn’t it?
Sometimes forwarded stories are helpful, like the “identifying a stroke” email which gives common sense advice, directing would-be rescuers to ask the afflicted person try to smile, raise both arms, and speak a simple sentence.
Well, it’s helpful unless you get the version of the email that tells you to determine if the person’s tongue is crooked, or to stab all ten of his/her fingertips with a sharp needle to draw off troublesome blood.
A forward may or may not start out with real information, but as it is passed along it gathers baloney like black polar fleece collects blond dog hair.
Tip offs:
•The story name-drops prominent-sounding authorities or organizations but doesn’t really lead you to a source you can check out.
•The story that has been passed on and on insists it is true, often saying something like, “This is an actual true story and not one of those internet stories that are passed on and on.”
•The story has letters in bold type and perhaps ALL-CAPS and perhaps appears in red ink.
•The story wants you to send it on, even begs you to send it on and maybe stoops to threatening you if you do not.
•You and I want to believe the story because it scares us or ignites our political passions or because it seems like passing it on will help someone.
It won’t, so please don’t.
LOCAL DIRECTORY
Last week I visited my daughter’s first home away from our home—a house rented with two college roommates in a small American city, at the latitude of bright red and golden deciduous leaves and pumpkins in the fields ready for Halloween.
