YESTERDAY, to avoid the long lines, I used the recently installed automated system and checked myself out of my local supermarket: two pints of Häagen-Dazs frozen coffee yogurt, three rolls of white necessary paper, a package of six Bays English muffins, a small bag of vine-ripened tomatoes. Following instructions, I used my preferred customers card, I scanned each item, I paid in cash, I took my change. After bagging my groceries, I moved on out, smartly. One small step for man, I felt, one large step for Joseph Epstein.
I’m always pleased when I am able to avail myself of the most recent bit of new technology that life throws up nowadays. It makes me feel I’m still in the game. I have a number of friends, contemporaries, who dropped out some while ago, most at the stage of home computers, which they decided they didn’t really need. Why did they need email when the phone was at hand; word-processing when a typewriter had served them so well over the years; Google when they lived so close to a library? Who needs it, they exclaimed?
I fear that they do–that we all do. I think that something more is at stake than the greater efficiency that technological change sometimes brings about. Not, to be sure, that all of it is absolutely required; I, for one, don’t need a remote at my bedside to put the lights on in the bathroom should I wake in the middle of the night. I feel telephone technology generally is vastly overdone, and I’ve never met a telephone menu I didn’t dislike. But a lot of these gadgets have made life easier, a tad happier, a bit better. Bring ’em on, I say.
Some of us are selectively stymied by the fresh advents of the new high tech. I felt myself a wizard of my old VCR, then made a mistake and bought a higher quality, more complex one–with a voice that uttered instructions–that left me baffled. I have friends, a couple, retired physicians, who have a highly complex arrangement of multiple computers, yet have concluded that they cannot handle the relatively simple mechanics of ATM machines. When I asked the wife what they do to obtain cash, she said that each month they just take out a stack of money–the amount was not specified–and put it in a drawer, and use it as their own personal ATM.
Many people are born with a natural curiosity about how things work. I, alas, wasn’t. My curiosity has always been restricted to how human beings work, not that I have been all that successful in satisfying it. I was not a boy who could make model planes; left alone with an X-acto blade, I would probably have greeted the digital age with many fewer digits. Nor could I lose myself in the intricacies of Lincoln Logs, an Erector Set, or test tubes and chemicals. When science became at all intricate, when it left the state of simple wonder, my mind departed the room. Several decades later, it has yet to return.
Yet I take great pride in being able to do simple tasks around our apartment. A few years ago, I changed all our bedroom and bathroom doorknobs. I discovered I have an eye for hanging pictures true. I’ve learned to replace batteries in my and my wife’s wrist-watches, saving four or five bucks each time by being able to do so. I can handle very minor plumbing jobs. I have learned how to replace halogen bulbs. None of this qualifies me for being on a first-name basis with the crowd down at Home Depot, but I derive small but genuine satisfaction from doing such tasks.
Where I do often run into trouble is remembering from one season to another how to make minor adjustments on modestly high-tech equipment. At daylight savings time, I can be counted on to forget how to change the digital clock in my car. Adding software to my computer is always an adventure, one that not infrequently ends up in frustrated anger–“I sense rage,” as the shrinks say–at my own ignorance.
“Man rides machine,” wrote Emerson, who never had to ride any machine more complicated than a train. I doubt he would have felt the same if his car had broken down on a major thoroughfare owing to an electrical failure; or if he’d been rendered unable to write a sermon because his computer had gone down. The prig Thoreau, seeing us frustrated by technology, would probably have said, as it seemed to please him so much to say, “I told you so.”
You won’t find me plugged into an iPod or checking into the Mayo Clinic for the first cell-phone implant, but should you see me using the computer check-in at O’Hare or doing some other mildly high-tech operation you might note a certain smugness in my manner. Come a bit closer and you might hear me lightly singing, “you ain’t nothin’ but a houndog.” They said I was low-tech, but that was just a lie.
–Joseph Epstein
