← Columns

This is Not Working!

The Source

This is Not Working! I’ve come to a startling conclusion: It’s not working. I know that speaking out against technology is like spitting in the wind, but dog-gone it, it’s just not working. This happens perhaps three times a week: I’ll call someone on a business matter, they’ll be unavailable to answer so I leave a message at the beep as directed, then almost unfailingly they will call me back and say, “I see you called me.” I know I called you! And I left the message I meant to leave! Why can’t you push the button and listen to the stupid message that your stupid machine told me to leave, stupid! Why spend the time to leave a detailed message that no one ever hears? Are they paying two hundred bucks a month for a phone they don’t know how to use? I often use a service called Call-Em-All where with a single phone call I contact an entire play cast or one of my classes. It never fails. If I send out a message saying, “Bring your costumes tonight. No need to call me back,” to 20 people, at least 15 of them will call back saying, “I see you called.” Yes I called! I called to save myself making twenty phone calls. Now I’m making sixteen! It’s not working. If the advances in communication are designed for us to advance communication then this ship is sinking. We’re going backwards, Bubba. I can’t count the times I’ve sent an email to someone who’s abandoned his or her computer entirely in favor of a cell phone. This is supposed to be a great advance in interpersonal communication. You can read your email or Facebook messages in the toilet of Grand Central Station instead of traveling back to your computer in Jacksonville. But time after time I’m confronted with friends who fail to read the entire message because it won’t fit onto their small screen and either they’re too lazy to scroll down or they don’t know how their finger works. It’s not working! Last week I sat at Best Buffet enjoying a meal with friends who had put their cell phones away simply because I told them I refused to talk with them if they checked their messages while we ate. There were three of us. One didn’t carry her cell phone with her, the second smilingly agreed, and the third member nearly went into shock. “Look at that,” I said. I pointed to a family of four sitting across the restaurant, a half-acre of Egg Foo Something and Crab Rangoon separating us. The two adults were probably in their thirties while their kids hovered somewhere in the land of adolescence. This was the sort of evening I loved when I was young. The whole family took a night off from ballgames and television and we ate out together. I’m sure you’re ahead of me at this point. Every member of that lovely little American family was texting. They were not waiting on their food to be delivered. This was a buffet! They’d been to the troughs of sodium-soaked Oriental delicacies and they were texting while they were eating. I kept watching. I thought that surely something newsworthy had come across their newsfeeds . . . the Grand Canyon had blown up . . . the Pope had saved an entire Carnival Cruise Ship from sinking . . . the Cubs had won a game. But…no. They were simply texting. This sweet little replica of Norman Rockwell’s America was spending the evening together by spending it with someone else. This is not working! I know this dates me, but I can remember the days when you could leave a message on someone’s home phone machine and they’d have to listen to it. I can remember when you’d send an email and the recipient owned a big enough screen to read it. I can recall food being consumed without electronics. Heck, I can even remember when I could look up a person’s number in the phone book. It’s not in vogue to compliment the French on anything other than their ability to make a great crepe, but in France the government allows certain establishments to use blocking devices. You set up the little zapper in your theatre or your restaurant and it effectively blocks out all cell phone signals. Voila! Eureka! Crepe Suzette! What a great invention! . . . and such miraculous contraptions are not allowed in the United-Cell-Phone-States-Of-America. I know that certain conservative religious denominations once campaigned against indoor bathtubs as the work of Satan and that fighting the onslaught of “advanced” communications is akin to defying Newton’s law of gravity, but in my estimation this is pretty rotten able someone has dropped upon us. I suspect Satan.