In homage to Salvador Dali, the artist who bent time, life, and human perception to the possibility of a new day over the horizon.
Irony of ironies.
As we were concluding our 60th Reunion of the 1952 St. Christopher’s 8th Grade Class this past Sunday, I thought it might be a good time to update and obtain accurate e-mail addresses from some of my fellow classmates. Things were going fine until I reached one old friend who responded in a friendly way as follows:
“No, you cannot have my e-mail address because I don’t have one and never will. If you want to talk with me, just pick up the phone and call. I don’t have time for any of that (newfangled) stuff.”
I was a little shocked, but not surprised. Some people are still offended by the idea of e-mail contact as cold and impersonal because it allows for no immediate chew-the-fat social time. I’m sure that a century ago there were still people who took offense at telephone call attempts from anyone other than immediate family:
“No, you cannot have my telephone number, so, please don’t ask again. If you want to talk with me, drop by the house sometime and leave your calling card. I’ll let you know if I want to talk with you.”
E-mail, the Internet, the computer – these things are just too “new” for some people, even though the home computer has now been around since its primitive days in the early 1980s and the Internet since the 1990s. To some people, they are still “strange visitors from a strange land” – and with much power to evoke intimidation.
Fifteen years ago, I cut bait in my private office from a human answering service that then handled a pretty high volume of calls for my consultant services. I did so for reasons of cost effectiveness and the availability of new answering machine technology that would allow me to handle the same calls in virtually the same way in my own voice at hardly any cost once I got past the reasonable price of the equipment at the original point of sale.
It worked great. My fears that people might be offended by a recorded message were quickly dispelled. More places were doing the same thing in the mid-1990s and the expectations of callers were adjusting to the change as simply a shift to the “new normal.”
Only thing is, “voice mail” service from AT&T and other phone company providers soon proved even better and we all moved to that generic option for quality, price, and the lack of maintenance that came with answering machine tape purchases and equipment breakdowns.
Oh, yes. – Back to “irony of ironies.” My classmate said he didn’t have time for e-mail. The irony is – we only were able to organize our reunion so quickly because of Internet e-mail – not because of the telephone. And because of the e-mail technology, I was able to write a column on the reunion that appeared on the Internet for the whole world to see yesterday – and on the very first morning that followed the event.
I was also able to send eleven individual people photos by e-mail attachment to all classmates who have the Internet. My friend who declared his lack of time for the Internet (and here comes that irony winger again) did not get these for some simple reasons. (1) He doesn’t have the Internet and an e-mail box that could receive them; (2) I don’t have time to go buy the photo paper I would need to print them out at some extra expense to me; and (3) I really don’t have time this week to package hard copy photos (that I don’t possess anyway) and take them down to the post office and stand in line to pay the postage on sending these out by “snail mail.”
Because of the Internet e-mail option, it is possible today to send something like a 500-page manuscript to your editor, publisher, or printing typesetter and get an almost instant response the same way. The net result is faster communication with greater clarity of purpose and better positive movement of production.
The quill, typewriters, telephones, and the post office could never bring us all together quite so magnificently.
As for the straight communication of information, like the time and date for an important meeting, it happens instantly with those are Internet-wired and accustomed to checking their e-mail boxes daily. What slows you down are the people who don’t check their e-mail boxes – and those who only have phones and may not even have a voice mail option.
After a while, it makes you wish that people who want get involved in any kind of serious dynamic group action in 2012 would either get themselves wired to the task before they sign up – or else – just hold off until they are.
It’s nothing personal. It’s just how it is. If we want to fly with the eagles these days, we’ve got to have a craft that will get us off the ground. And that craft is no longer a landline phone at home without any voice mail.
The Pecan Park Eagle 
October 16, 2012 at 2:39 pm |
Another home run Bill , you hit it a mile, todays favorite form of commuication is the internet , it is my phone,my business ,my art my banking , my answering servive , my news source and heck it helps my foggy memory ( google) helps me to remember names & enents and more importantly be in contact instanly with my family , now spread across the country in various states, E-mailing today ?,,, sure ,bring it on.
October 16, 2012 at 6:48 pm |
How true, no one would have found me. I’m so glad Bill found my E-mail
October 16, 2012 at 7:49 pm |
Actually, I thought email was slowly dying towards the late part of last decade (2006-2009), but with the advent of the smart phone, email has had new life breathed into it. You see, with social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter (the first real social networking site being Myspace), people switched to those avenues as a form of actual message communication (and live, instant communication) leaving emailing seeming more “primative” by 2008 or so, but email serves as so much more than a method of messaging people now.
With smartphones, one can be informed instantly of when they have a new email, and emails can be used to “alert” you of various things. For example, I can get a notification email as soon as someone replies to this blog and be alerted immediately as to when someone replied.
I have several email addresses and get alerts on my smartphone for each one, and without even looking at my phone, I know what kind of email it is based on the assigned ringtone I gave that particular email address; one is my personal email address that I use to actually send email messages, one for receipt notification of online purchases (that one has a cash register “cha-CHING!” sound effect), one is a forum notifier, a Facebook notifier, and another one for a different forum that I follow.
The information age is here, and as such, people expect immediate replies sometimes. One would think that with the advancement of technology that we’d have more times for ourselves when, in fact, just the opposite is happening. Now that we can be more productive with instant information and demand for productivity is at an all-time high, most of us STILL don’t have time to cook a healthy meal!