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Fighting the Phone and Other Technological Foes
By Pamela J. Anderson
The problem occurred when I had to answer the phone. In our eight-year absence from the States, Ma Bell had been deregulated and you had to buy your phone from a store. My husband, Tim, who enjoys bells and whistles of all sorts, came home with two cordless varieties and installed one in the kitchen and one in the bedroom. Now, there's something wrong when you have to consult an owner's manual to answer the phone. I refused to read the manual in the firm belief that if I had to read the manual, there was something wrong with the phone, not me. Besides, it had one of those irritating beeps that wouldn't go away no matter what we did. We tried everything. We tried leaving it off the cradle. We tried leaving it on the cradle. We tried replacing the battery. (We didn't try throwing it against the wall.) Only later did we discover that the set was defective. We brought it back to the store and exchanged it for the no-frills variety with no optional buttons that could go haywire.
I have an inherent distrust of machines in their new and improved state, which translated, does not always mean better. Consider our porch light. It seemed simple enough at first. It had a switch inside the house that when flipped in the up position, should have turned the light on. No such luck. There were two different switches on the light itself, with three positions each. It also had one of those electronic eye things that was supposed to turn the light on in the presence of someone in its path. We never did figure out which positions the two switches should have been in to work the light, but we did find out that you had to be taller than 5'6" to trip the light. It didn't give us much confidence to know that a short burglar could burgle away with impunity at our house.
Albert Einstein once said, "It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity." I tend to agree with Mr. Einstein. One of the more noticeable technological changes on returning to the U.S. was that you could no longer talk to an honest-to-goodness person when you made a phone call. Instead, you were treated to a litany of menu choices, answering machines, and voice mail. Pity the poor soul who still has a rotary phone. I tried calling the Public Health office to inquire about getting inoculations that were needed for my sons' entry into the Fairfax County school system. I suffered through sixteen renditions (count them) of "We are currently experiencing delays in our phone system. If you would like to speak to someone in WIC [what language is that?], press one. If you would like to speak to someone in Spanish, press two. For all other inquiries, please hold and someone will be with you shortly."
We had lived overseas in the developing world for eight years before being posted back to Washington, D.C. Overseas we often had to adapt to life as it used to be, sometimes centuries ago. Returning to the States, it was a fast forward into the future, and I felt like I was in a time warp, a 21st century Rip Van Winkle, being dragged kicking and screaming into the computer age. I slowly came to term with those changes.
I'm neither a technophobe nor a computer geek but fall somewhere in between. Admittedly, the day before I left my job at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo in 1995, I was informed that I had 576 unread e-mails. I had been introduced to the e-mail system on the day I first reported to work and promptly forgot about it, confident in the knowledge that anyone who wanted to correspond with me would know my dislike of newfangled communication systems and would contact me using other methods. I neglected to take into consideration the official notices that were sent to everyone on the State Department system. Needless to say, the computer whizzes were not happy with me as they were the ones who had to delete all those messages. I have since mended my ways.
In fact, after approximately 18 months stateside, I made peace with the machines in my life…mostly. I recognized that the cultural dissonance I had been experiencing was all part of the reverse culture shock that most, if not all of us, experienced on our return "home." Call it an occupational hazard.
I am progressing. I have made the transition from Windows 95 to Windows NT to Windows ME. We even have caller ID on our phone. Now if only I could figure out how to program our DVD…
Pamela J. Anderson currently lives in Dhaka, Bangladesh, with her
AID-employed husband. She teaches business English writing skills and
ESL when she is not drafting correspondence to major retailers. She previously
lived in Islamabad, Cairo, and Washington, DC, while raising two sons.