It’s become nearly impossible in these times to maintain a social presence without the use of electronic devices. It’s nothing new; even the oldest of us used the telephone to do business and keep in touch with the world beyond our dooryards. The desktop and wall-hung rotary phones gave way some time ago to innovation, and now it’s a rare person indeed who doesn’t carry the world in his pocket. No more running to “get the phone” or a comically long cord stretching from a wall phone down the hall to disappear behind a teenager’s closed bedroom door.
The difference in convenience and capacity is staggering. But it comes, naturally, with costs. Chief among them for people of a certain age, like me, is the occasional hiatus in service or the apparently malicious refusal to perform a function that’s been routine, until it suddenly ceases to exist. Friends of mine with more savvy in the care and treatment of electronic devices often curse lustily and begin searching for the cause and restoration of the operation, phones clicking away like roulette wheels as they type madly into their devices.
Not I. When something in my setup dies suddenly, I may curse, but more confusedly than lustily. And I’ve completely quit wondering why. The answers are far beyond my ken, wrapped in inscrutable technical jargon. And who cares why, anyway? I couldn’t fix it if I knew. So I generally just shut off the device and turn it back on after a suitable rest. Amazingly, this usually works.
But the failure becomes especially troublesome when it’s in the GPS positioning system that’s at that moment guiding you through a maze of unfamiliar streets and roads. You’ve been relying on a firm voice (the one in my dashboard has a lovely Irish accent) giving direction as your vehicle — a tiny arrow creeping across a screen — threads its way through alien territory, surrounded by an army of vehicles rushing at top speed toward destinations familiar to their drivers, and suddenly you’re effectively immobile. The one time it happened to me that I remember best was in Massachusetts somewhere near Boston. I recognized no names and had no idea where the next choice would take me. But I could see the sun and knew what time of day it was, and the compass was working, as well. I figured that if I headed east, through whatever it took me, I’d hit either Route One, which runs from Key West to Fort Kent (hard to miss) or the Atlantic Ocean (even harder to miss). That, after much wrangling through traffic, worked like a charm, and I got where I was going.
One major failing of the human race is that we remember the mistakes, the failures and the bad times much more clearly than the good times. Thus our electronic tools often bear the brunt of our misfortunes, rather than receive the accolades due them for perfect performances. The text you’re reading, for example, has obviously been typed (with many hunt-and-peck fumbles now proliferating with age), transmitted, processed, edited, and printed by electronics working properly. It’s been saved at least twice during each paragraph by a human being who can’t forget the two occasions he completed the last paragraph, pushed the wrong button, lost the whole shooting match, and had to start over from scratch at 11 o’clock at night.
This past weekend was for me a perfect demonstration of the advances made in GPS technology. How different it is now from its frontier days, when the little dot of the car crawled across the screen in utter lack of context. Bea and I had to drive, during the first weekend of leaf-peeping season, from East Montpelier, Vermont, to a place (you can do this now — use a restaurant, for example) called Castle in the Clouds near Moultonborough, New Hampshire. Typing in the destination was a major pain in the neck, but the GPS helpfully completed it for me as soon as it sensed where I was headed. I was expecting a major problem where Interstate-93 intersected with Route 104, and thence through the bumper-to-bumper traffic of Meredith. But for some reason (and true to form, I didn’t ask why), the lovely lady in the dashboard led me instead over back roads in New Hampshire to an intersection with Route 104 east of Meredith. We had only a few miles of highway to the road leading to the dedicated climb up a low mountain to Castle in the Clouds. We luxuriated in mile after mile of flaming leaves along the back roads, but no tourist traffic at all. A photo of the Kancamagus Highway that I saw this evening showed me what we’d missed. I don’t know how she did it. I’ve thanked her audibly. But I’m also nervous that, having won a modicum of trust, she may have some future outrage up her sleeve.
