Think how much better off the world would be if everybody—young and old, black and white, American and Russian, Time and Newsweek—spent part of each day playing with an Etch-a-Sketch. Think how great it would be if they had public Etch-a-Sketches for you to use while you were waiting in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles. And imagine what would happen if, instead of guns, our young soldiers carried Etch-a-Sketches into battle! They would be cut down like field mice under a rotary mower! So we can’t carry this idea too far.
So anyway, as I said, this got me to thinking about technology in general. Too often—three or four times a week, according to some figures—we take technology for granted. When we drop our money into a vending machine at our place of employment and press the button for a tasty snack selection of crackers smeared with “cheez,” a nondairy petroleum subproduct approved for use on humans, we are blithely confident that the machine will automatically, much of the time, hurl our desired selection down into the pickup bin, using a computerized electronic snack-ejection device that gives our snack a bin impact velocity of nearly 70 miles an hour, which is what is required to reduce our crackers to a fine, dayglow-orange grit. We rarely stop to consider that without this device, the only way the vending-machine manufacturers would be able to achieve this kind of impact velocity would be to use gravity, which means the machines would have to be 40 feet tall!
Of course, not all technology is good. Some is exactly the opposite (bad). The two obvious examples of this are the hydrogen bomb and those plastic “sneeze shields” they put over restaurant salad bars for your alleged hygiene protection. I have said this before, but it needs to be said again: Sneeze shields actually spread disease, because they make it hard for a squat or short-armed person to reach back to the chick peas and simulated bacon, and some of these people inevitably are going to become frustrated and spit in the House Dressing (a creamy Italian).
But this does not mean we should be against technology in general. Specifically, we should not be so hostile toward telephone-answering machines. I say this because I own one, and I am absolutely sick unto death of hearing people say—they all say this; it must be Item One on the curriculum in Trend College—”I just hate to talk to a machine!” They say this as though it is a major philosophical position, as opposed to a description of a minor neurosis. My feeling is, if you have a problem like this, you shouldn’t go around trumpeting it; you should stay home and practice talking to a machine you can feel comfortable with, such as your Water Pik, until you are ready to assume your place in modern society, OK?
Meanwhile, technology marches on, thanks to new inventions conceived of by brilliant innovative creative geniuses such as a friend of mine named Clint Collins. Although he is really a writer, Clint has developed an amazingly simple yet effective labor-saving device for people who own wall-to-wall carpeting but don’t want to vacuum it. Clint’s concept is, you cut a piece of two-by-four so it’s as long as your vacuum cleaner is wide, and just before company comes, you drag it across your carpet, so it leaves parallel marks similar to the ones caused by a vacuum. Isn’t that great? The only improvement I can think of would be if they wove those lines into the carpet right at the factory, so you wouldn’t even need a two-by-four.
Another recent advantage in technology comes from Joseph DiGiacinto, my lawyer, who has developed a way to fasten chopsticks together with a rubber band and a little wadded-up piece of paper in such a way that you can actually pick up food with them one-handed. You don’t have to ask your waiter for a fork, which makes you look like you just tromped in from Des Moines and never even heard of sweet and sour pork. If you’d like to get in on this high-tech culinary advance, send an envelope with your address and a stamp on it to: Chopstick Concept, C/o Joseph DiGiacinto, Legal Attorney at Law, 235 Main Street, White Plains, NY 10601, and he’ll send you, free, a Chopstick Conversion Kit—including a diagram, a rubber band, and instructions that can be wadded up for use as your paper wad—just as soon as I let him know that he has made this generous offer. He also does wills. And what other advances does the future hold, technology-wise? Even as you read these words, white-coated laboratory geeks are working on a revolutionary new camera that not only will focus automatically, set the exposure automatically, flash automatically, and advance the film automatically, but will also automatically refuse to take stupid pictures, such as of the wing out the airplane window.
Trouble On The Line
I want them to stop explaining my long-distance options to me. I don’t want to know my long-distance options. The more I know about my long-distance options, the more I feel like a fool.
They did this to us once before, with our financial options. This was back in the seventies. Remember? Up until then, if you had any excess money, you put it in a passbook savings account paying 51/4 percent interest, and your only financial options were, did you want the toaster or the electric blanket. For a really slick high-finance maneuver, you could join the Christmas Club, where you gave the bank some money each week, and, at the end of the year, the bank gave you your money back. These were simple, peaceful times, except for the occasional Asian land war.
And then, without warning, they made it legal for consumers to engage in complex monetary acts, many of them involving “liquidity.” Today, there are a whole range of programs in which all that happens is people call up to ask what they should do with their money:
“Hi, Steve? My wife and I listen to you all the time, and we just love your show. Now here is the problem: We’re 27 years old, no kids, and we have a combined income of $93,000, and $675,000 in denatured optional treasury instruments of accrual, which will become extremely mature next week.”
Now to me, those people do not have a problem. To me, what these people need in the way of financial advice is: “Lighten up! Buy yourself a big boat and have parties where people put on funny hats and push the piano into the harbor!” But Mr. Consumer Radio Money Advisor, he tells them complex ways to get even more money and orders them to tune in next week. These shows make me feel tremendously guilty, as a consumer, because I still keep my money in accounts that actually get smaller, and sometimes disappear, like weekend guests in an old murder mystery, because the bank is always taking out a “service charge,” as if the tellers have to take my money for walks or something.
So I feel like a real consumer fool about my money, and now I have to feel like a fool about my phone, too. I liked it better back when we all had to belong to the same Telephone Company, and phones were phones—black, heavy objects that were routinely used in the movies, as murder weapons (try that with today’s phones!). Also, they were permanently attached to your house, and only highly trained Telephone Company personnel could “install” them. This involved attaching four wires, but the Telephone Company always made it sound like brain surgery. It was part of the mystique. When you called for your installation appointment, the Telephone Company would say: “We will have an installer in your area between the hours Of 9 A.M. October 3 and the following spring. Will someone be at home?” And you would say yes, if you wanted a phone. You would stay at home, the anxious hours ticking by, and you would wait for your Phone Man. It was as close as most people came to experiencing what heroin addicts go through, the difference being that heroin addicts have the option of going to another supplier. Phone customers didn’t. They feared the power of the Telephone Company.