A World Without Computers

Friday, June 11, 2004

Page 15

AT THE SIDEBAR (Column)

A World Without Computers

By J’AMY PACHECO

I don’t know how people managed to communicate effectively without the amazing technology that today helps get things done.

But I’m learning.

Last week, I wrote here about my move to a new home. The new house is less than three miles from the old, but it feels like I’ve moved back in time, into another century.

For example: when I contacted the company that publishes the daily newspaper I read, they were happy to immediately stop delivery at the old address. To start service at the new address, they explained, would take longer. Nobody could explain why.

As I write this column, I am painfully unaware of what is going on in the world around me, because I’m still not receiving my newspaper.

Go figure.

When I visited the Post Office to arrange for my mail to be forwarded, they took a good half-hour to explain that my mail now has to be sent to San Diego. Since I don’t live anywhere near San Diego, I asked what the reason was. Nobody could explain, but they could tell me it would take about two weeks for any mail to be forwarded to me via San Diego.

Go figure.

And then there are the telephones. Mine is a two-line,

DSL-driven family that has grown accustomed to speed and reliability. But when the phone guy came to my house to hook up my phones—two days after we’d moved in, thanks to a telephone company scheduling boo-boo—he advised me he had not received an order for our second line.

After a few phone calls, he learned that it had been scheduled for installation three days later—requiring a second trip and despite the fact that the service requests had been placed at the same time.

Go figure.

So now, I’m back to tying up my single phone line with a dial-up modem connection that is so slow I am on the verge of impatience-fueled insanity. I think I could have carved this column in stone faster than it will take to send it by modem.

My computer’s fax modem is wrestling with my telephone to see which will handle incoming calls, which means callers are hearing fax tones, and I’m not receiving any faxes.

It’s very frustrating.

Funny thing is, it wasn’t that long ago that none of this technology was even available to the average Joe or Jane. Or J’Amy.

Although people had moved beyond cave drawings and papyrus scrolls to communicate by the time I was born, there was a point in my lifetime when computers were huge, unwieldy things that were used primarily to control rockets—sometimes, not very well.

When my husband got a personal computer in the 1980s, he was the talk of the neighborhood. Nobody we knew had one.

At first, we used it primarily for word processing. I recall feeling like a technological pioneer as I typed documents that would be printed on our state-of-the-art dot matrix printer. For a girl who grew up in the typewriter generation, this was heaven.

Then we moved onto computer bulletin boards, where people could communicate not-exactly-instantly by posting messages for one another. It was wondrous technology.

In the mid-1980s, I worked for several companies that sold big computer systems. I worked in customer service and quality assurance, and regularly dealt with unbelievable bugs in the software.

But people were so awed by the new technology that nobody really seemed surprised—or upset—that it didn’t always work.

Boy, try to get away with that today.

My eight-year-old can’t imagine a world without personal computers, Internet access and e-mail. Each member of my family has their own computer. They’re all networked, and we rely on them to find information, to communicate with friends and family, and to work quickly when we need them.

Which is why this whole degradation in service is making me so crazy. Perhaps I’ve come to take this technology—the ease of use, the instant communication at any time for granted.

If that’s the case, I offer my apologies to the gods of technology whom I’ve apparently offended.

I want my DSL back, just like I want my newspaper, my second telephone line and my U.S. mail.

But since relief is not yet on the horizon, maybe I’d better scrounge up some rocks, and sharpen my chisel…just in case.