TECHNOLOGY
The Apple Never Falls
Far From The Tree
The first thing you have to understand is that my wife cannot let the phone
ring without jumping up to answer it. The ring of a phone to her is like the
ding of a bell to a boxer. The air barely begins to vibrate and she is jumping
up, filled with anticipation and annoyance, ready to give and receive blows
in the fray at the center of the ring.
Before the “Do Not Call” list kicked in, we, like everybody else, were subjected nightly to an unwarranted bombardment of invasive calls from computer dialers and telemarketers who transformed our telephone from a simple device for discourse into a weapon of war. But my wife answered them all.
When the phone rang, I’d yell out “incoming!” she would take off, running low and zigzagging for the front line, always hopeful this one was a real call.
So I was not surprised after the phone rang one night to see her emerge from the kitchen a minute later with a scowl on her face and small puffs of steam mushrooming from her ears.
“Who was that, my dear,” I asked.
“That was our son,” she said.
“Oh, really? What did he have to say?”
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean?”
"He wasn’t there!”
“Well, if he wasn’t there, how do you know it was he?”
“I know because there is this hum on the line when he calls from Singapore!”
This may be an appropriate moment to digress. Some time ago, our son lived in Vietnam, a country the U.S.A. did not formally recognize for many years after our war there. To communicate, we had to send a fax to a number in Australia, which then forwarded it onto Vietnam. The fax machine was in our bedroom where it would go off at 3 AM, the electronic chatter of a communiqué emerging from its mysterious interior.
Eventually, he got a job in the cell phone division of Motorola, traveling throughout Southeast Asia, in a new world where anyone can talk to anyone anywhere, and soon enough he convinced me to buy a cell phone.
Up to that time, the only "portable" phone I had was a bulky bag phone purchased years earlier in my days as a TV newsman, My wife prefers a “land line” because it doesn’t play any games with her. But she still remembers, with some fondness, the big Motorola “brick” she inherited when I got my new cell.
It weighed several pounds and felt as solid as a dumbbell. She loved that phone. It was easy to find in her purse. She could drop it from an airplane and it still worked. And if she was ever attacked, she knew she could pull out the phone and smash her assailant over the head with it. That was her idea of "Reach out and Touch somebody!" He would definitely get the message, and think twice before trying again.
The cell phone I bought was, of course, from Motorola, a StarTac, and my son hooked me up with a clip-on organizer to store and dial phone numbers, addresses, and other data I could up-and-download to and from my computer.
It became, for me, a nifty little hip-hugging computer that nudged me one step further into the world of artificial intelligence.
But one problem soon revealed itself.
The phone has a little button on the side, which the manual refers to as the “smart button." Life has taught me, the hard way, that one must beware of words like that, for they frequently represent their author’s malicious sense of irony. Suffice it to say, this particular “smart button" made me feel and look stupid.
With the smart button, you can access a number of the phone’s functions. When depressed in a certain way, for instance, it automatically dials the first number in the phone’s address book. In my case, my kitchen.
There is a learning curve with such a phone and, as I punched its buttons in my indefatigable quest to discover new features, I more than once inadvertently called home.
“What the hell are you doing?” my wife would ask. “Why do you keep calling home? I hear you talking to other people but you’re not there!”
“I’m trying to figure something out on this phone,” I’d explain. “It’s complicated.”
“It’s nothing but a puny little phone,” she’d say. “Why don’t you get a real phone? I hate those little phones.”
“It's not an unreal phone,” I’d say. “It’s a little computer. But it’s complicated. I have to figure out how it works.”
“Well stop calling home and then not being there,” she’d say.
I was musing about all this when the phone rang the other night and she came out of the kitchen to announce that no one was there. It rang again, and she again jumped up to answer. A couple minutes later she walked back into the living room, shaking her head and muttering to herself.
“Who was that?” I asked, as is my wont.
“It was your son again,” she said.
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“He wasn’t there.”
“Well then,” I asked, summoning up again my irrepressible logic, “how do you know it was he?”
“How do I know it was he?” she mimicked.
“How do I know it was he? I’ll tell you how I know it was he. I answered the phone and said, ‘Hello!’ There was nothing there … just that hum from Singapore. I yelled, ‘Hello! Helllooooo!’ But there was nothing.
“Then I heard a door close. I heard footsteps go down some stairs, and then another door open, street sounds, a door close, a car door open and close, a car start and the radio come on and say, ‘Welcome to the BBC Singapore!’ That’s how I know it was he.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Well I could have stayed on, run up an immense telephone bill for him and spent the night in his pocket, listening to his life,” she said with an impish smile. “But I didn’t. I hung up.”
I smiled. Here was my son, 9,300 miles away, an expert in the field of cellular telecommunications, carrying his mother around in his pocket, oblivious to the fact that he must have unconsciously hit the “smart” button and called home.
‘That’s my boy,’ I thought. ‘I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.’