The phone actually rang the other day, instead of beeping or clicking. The voice on the other end of the line was pleasant, female — and virtually unknown.
“Don’t you know who this is?” the caller said, and identified herself as someone with whom I frequently communicate regarding animals. The telephone call was, in a word, nice. It also took less time than texting back and forth to deal with a potential problem.
As I pressed the end button, I absentmindedly set my phone on the 1957 Royal typewriter on my desk. I realized I have officially reached that ill-defined, indeterminate age men reach when they automatically grimace at technology.
Don’t get me wrong. I use tech, a lot, every single day. Texting, email and a variety of message platforms are de rigueur. I run a digital newspaper, as paradoxical as that term may seem. I get literally dozens of various messages every single day, but likely not more than a half-dozen calls, and those are almost always from numbers I have saved.
That was why I was so confused when the phone first rang. I initially started to ignore the call, figuring it was someone trying to sell me an extended warranty on one of my vehicles (most of which qualify for the vehicular equivalent of Social Security) or a Medicare supplement (for which I am not quite old enough to qualify, and wouldn’t buy from a random stranger calling from Isanpur, anyway).
As the joke goes, I am pre-GPS. I’m proud to be old enough to remember when we navigated with maps and later, with printouts from MapQuest, like we were pirates from a bygone era. I’m fairly sure a buddy and I found that place where the old cartographers wrote “Beyond Here There Be Dragons” when we got off on the wrong exit in Washington, D.C. once, but that’s a column for another day.
The typewriter on my desk is not the first one I ever used, but it is my most functional one. Whenever I have a little kid in my office, I encourage them to try it. Sure, I have a lot of tangled keys and I often have to rewind the ribbon, but it’s cool to see their eyes light up when they think of a letter, find the key and smack! It appears on the paper. Some of them go so far as to write notes on the old Royal. I treasure every single one written by my neophyte proteges that their proud mamas don’t take home for the refrigerator.
The keyboard is the same in terms of letters and symbols –QWERTYUIOP, etc. – as those on my computer, tablet and telephone, but it isn’t the same. A typewriter requires commitment to put a word down. Erasing isn’t as easy as backspacing, or highlighting and hitting delete. There’s no Command Z on a typewriter to reverse a series of mistakes, only a balled-up piece of paper tossed in frustration at a trashcan or a lot of Whiteout.
There is permanence to paper, which is one reason I take a lot of notes on virtually everything. It’s a habit I learned from my father; I still have dozens of his ubiquitous steno pads, filled with his handwriting, with his own code of abbreviations. It wasn’t a secret code, per se, but between his handwriting and what worked for him, he never needed to encrypt anything.
Usually the notes were news oriented, but I’ve found sketches and measurements of various projects, detailed historical references to things he found interesting (SRTLWOL, Pg6 G8, for example, referred to a book, page and paragraph) and even one list of prescriptions.
My own notes are not usually so cryptic, but they can be equally illegible and confusing to one who has no reason to be reading them anyway.
Whenever I have a reason to call a business, I automatically grab a pen and paper, if I’m not by my beloved Royal. I lie to write down the firm’s answers to my questions, since the process helps me think.
My blood ran cold the other day when an earnest young man on the end of the line explained that I could scan the QR code or logon to the company’s website via the link he’d just sent me by text. My question was ridiculously basic, on the lines of “Is water wet?”, but I wanted to be 100 percent sure of the answer.
Yet he couldn’t tell me.
I have no desire to download another application to any of my devices. I have yet to be able to successfully scan a QR code for anything, and I don’t really care how convenient and quick it might be. If someone else is content to further widen the communications gulf that was created through the fear of the pandemic then I say that’s their choice. We became frightened of speaking to others during the pandemic, never moreso than when, some flibbertigidiot actually posted a drunken social media rant about catching COVID by talking on the telephone — and people believed it.
I am not interested in trusting any company with my bank account information so they can automatically take out the amount they say on the date they choose, and I never have a physical bill for said service.
I have yet to see the efficiency in wasting time by scanning a QR code to download an app to take me to a website that doesn’t answer my question so I get sent into a telephone tree that’s tangled as a kudzu vine in a blackberry bramble just so I can be charged $10 to speak with an actual person who may or may not be able to answer my question in English, leading me to give up in frustration after having supplied the company with more data to sell to other companies.
If one of those billionaires really want to make some money, he or she would come up with a product or service that everyone needs, and only offer customer service via telephone to a live human being, at no extra cost. And all of it – product, service, customer service – made and performed in America.
Perhaps one day one of the bright-eyed young’uns who cautiously push down on the dirty keys of my Royal will have a similar visceral reaction, and become that entrepreneur who saves us from QR codes and customer disservice apps. If so, I hope I can be one of the first in line to support them – without scanning something on my phone, logging into an app, or pressing One for English.
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