CDs

CDs

This will be short as it’s Saturday. The Luddite actually likes CDs, although he was very annoyed when they first stormed the market and caught he and Mrs. Luddite with a load of old LPs.

Mrs. Luddite was a member of a music club of some kind at the time and was offered a very good deal on the complete symphonies of Beethoven. It turned out that what they were doing was clearing out as many LPs from their stock as possible, so we bought them; finding something to play them on is becoming an increasing challenge.

At first, The Luddite was stubborn and would not give them up. He even found an electronics store in Fort Collins, CO, that stocked replacement needles for his still-functioning Toshiba turntable and bought several. Now that CDs are not a fad, however, The Luddite has bowed to the inevitable and Mrs. Luddite is now replacing some of the LPs we had.

You can imagine the rage that took over The Luddite when he heard that there was some new kind of CD technology out there that is supposed to supplant the old CDs and make neither playable on the same player. You try and keep up and what happens? Something you haven’t heard of pops it’s head up and threatens to send you right back to the Stone Age again.

The reason that The Luddite likes CDs is because they don’t have to be cleaned all the time and don’t have that annoying rumble and hiss that LPs had. Yes, it was in the background and no, The Luddite is not some kind of audiophile; it’s just that CDs simply sound better without all that background clutter. Plus, The Luddite does not have to scour the countryside looking for a phonograph needle. He may be suspicious of technology but he’s not crazy.

There is supposed to be some other sound advantage to CDs, but The Luddite does not know what it is. There was supposed to be an advantage to Quadraphonic sound when it was being hyped, too, but The Luddite reasoned that since he didn’t have four ears, he didn’t need four speakers, either.

Picture Phones

Picture Phones

The Luddite has already talked about cel phones in an earlier piece. Now he is going to talk about their bastard cousins, picture phones.

The appeal of the picture phone is apparently to send pictures to people of something you are actually looking at while you are talking to them, instead of simply describing it. Yeah, The Luddite doesn’t get it either.

There is a drawback to the picture phone, but The Luddite doesn’t know what it is. There must be. There are drawbacks with everything else. He doesn’t know how much power they use or what a low battery might do to its picture-taking or sending qualities. Also, he doesn’t know how much longer you have to stay on the phone while transmitting one of these things.

Since Mrs. Luddite is ramrodding a camera lab and bringing her considerable artistic talents to printmaking, she has had a lot of experience with the quality of the pictures taken by these phones, especially when people bring in the little digital chip to have prints made. The Luddite can safely say that the quality of the pictures these things take really sucks, so much so that it would be easier and probably more economical just to describe on the phone what you are looking at.

This would eliminate the dreaded Slide Show, which seems to happen after every vacation, but other than that, The Luddite sees no advantage in it.

The people on vacation have this weird idea that other people actually want to see what they are looking at. Between you and I, they don’t. They want to BE on vacation, not look at pictures from someone else’s.

But that is getting a bit off the track. The Luddite also has heard that, like paying for video games by phone, the telephone company charges you extra each time each time you use these things to send a picture to someone. This is only fair, since The Luddite can’t imagine them doing it for free, but The Luddite cannot see what you are gaining by taking a picture with a phone. You get charged twice. Why not just take the shot with a camera, pay for the printing and to hell with the phone company. Doing it the other way seems like another expense, like going on vacation with TWO spare tires.

Teevee 2

Teevee 2

Yesterday, The Luddite wrote about the fact that he does not have cable television. This spurred some speculation that all The Luddite has is a little black-and-white portable.

Sigh.

The point was how important cable television has become to this society, not the equipment The Luddite has, if this remark was even serious at all. For your information, he has a Magnavox 20-inch color set that he inherited from a friend who was moving to Oregon and had no room for it on the truck. The set was superfluous to Gerg anyway, so he asked The Luddite if he wanted it. Since The Luddite’s existing Zenith System 3 crapped out a month after his friend left, it is good that The Luddite said ‘sure,’ even though his main motivation was that it was summer and he was tired of moving stuff.

Since it was brought up anyway, The Luddite will address the equipment. The Luddite has seen the large home-entertainment systems with the 60-inch screens. His sister-in-law has one. The Luddite thinks they look nice but if you are looking for some kind of compliment, you aren’t going to get one. TV screens don’t particularly interest me unless there is a football game on that I want to see. Otherwise, it’s just a box with colored lights in it. Some people have mentioned in bars that The Luddite’s attention sure drifts to one when they are talking, but this is because they aren’t saying anything particularly interesting, a fact that The Luddite has wisely kept to himself.

The television set has settled into a niche in this society that is almost totemistic. My parents always have one on in the background, even when no one is watching it; sports bars have them at every possible angle; they are even built into the roofs of minivans, ostensibly to help keep the kids from asking if ‘we are there yet.’

Fans in stadiums even have little battery-powered TVs that they look at rather than looking at the actual field—even if they have good seats. This really flips The Luddite out and makes him wonder why they even made the trip to the stadium in the first place so they could look at the game on a window smaller than a piece of scratch paper.

But what really got to The Luddite was when he stopped at a small campground in California and someone pulled in later in an RV about the size of a prison bus. The Luddite went to the bathroom that evening and when he passed the RV, he glanced in one of the windows and saw a guy and his wife looking at a TV set, just as if they were back home in their living room. ‘Jesus,’ The Luddite thought, ‘are you ever roughing it.’

The Luddite does not believe in suffering for suffering’s sake, although he has to admit it somehow it appeals to his Catholic nature. However, there is a difference between going camping and bringing the entire house with you. Going into the Great Outdoors makes you more appreciative of what you have when you get back. One of the things The Luddite liked most about going camping was coming back, dropping a friend of his off and sitting on her father’s padded toilet seat, even if he didn’t have to go. Somehow, having a TV with you ruins all of that.

The Teevee

Television
Here is something that The Luddite is told is remarkable. He does not have cable TV.

That’s right. In this world of multiple channels, The Luddite does not have cable TV and has not had it for over a year. He has never seen an episode of The Sopranos. He has never seen The Real World. Except for a rerun of Fear Factor that The Luddite saw while doing the laundry, he has never seen reality TV.

The idea was so shocking to a fellow at the local cable company when he called to tell me about their dynamite product and how superior it was to a satellite dish, that he nearly had a heart attack. It went something like this:

Cable Person: Good morning, Mr. Olson. I’m [identifies himself] and I’d like to take a moment to explain to our programming to you and how much better it is than anything you might be getting through a dish. Do you have a satellite provider?

Me: No.

Cable Person: Well, congratulations. Who is your cable provider?

Me: No one.

Cable Provider: I mean who supplies your town with cable TV?

Me: I don’t know.

Cable Provider: Well, they must send out a bill, sir. Who do you make the check out to?

Me: Nobody.

Cable Provider: [long pause] You mean you don’t have cable?

Me: That’s right.

Cable Provider: [disbelieving] Not even Basic?

Me: No.

Cable Provider: [rattled but trying to rally] Well, would you consider signing up with us?

Me: No.

Cable Provider: Why not, sir?

Me: Because the $40 a month I’d pay for your product goes for groceries. It’s more important to me to eat.

Cable Provider: Well we have some very exciting packages available.

Me. Not exciting enough for my grocer to take in trade.

Cable Provider: Excuse me?

Me: Look, the simple fact is that I don’t want anything you have to offer. When I was living in a condo, I could afford it. Now that I have a house, I can’t. I have an aerial hooked up to this house and to my set. I can get everything I want through the air with that. All I have to do is sit through some commercials and I have a remote to mute those. What do I want with your product?

Cable Provider: Well we have channels for specialized interests….

Me: I’m sure you do, but that doesn't make my life any better.

Cable Provider: [stubbornly] But out terms are very reasonable.

Me: Choosing between eating and watching a rerun on The Cartoon Channel does not sound very reasonable to me. [Hangs up.]

The Luddite was not kidding. He simply cannot afford cable. Cable folk would disagree, but it’s true. After a year of doing without, he doesn’t really miss it either. He still stays up on current events--although he does not know lots culturally--but he makes his mortgage payments regularly, he can afford to fix his car and he even votes, which a lot of you folks who have cable are apparently too damn busy to get around doing. [UPDATE: This was written before the '04 Election. Well, you proved me wrong there. Bet you don't vote in '08. The Luddite sure will.]

Life is actually pretty decent without cable. Really. You should try it for a year sometime. The rates would probably drop precipitously as more and more people left. The Luddite does not expect people will actually DO this, but he’s been doing just fine without it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m in the middle of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which is not a bad read for a 42-year-old book about pesticides.

The Columbia

The Columbia

It’s been 19 years since the Challenger blew up and The Luddite was just beginning to regard shuttle flights as a routine thing when 60 some seconds from landing, with seven people aboard, February 1, 2003, the Columbia fell apart like Watergate testimony.

The Luddite is not being blithe. This was his reaction to the bad kind of surprise. What makes it really bad was that as technologically hopeless as he is, The Luddite knew one of these things was going to kill some more people because it was a compromise design. I have lots of ammo supporting my contention that compromise designs are always a bad thing.

Here’s one you’ve probably never heard of: the chauchat, which was the name of a World War I machine gun, designed by a committee. The Luddite is not a gun nut, he simply files away big mistakes in his head as a weird sort of hobby and because there are all kinds of teaching parallels out there.

Anyway, the chauchat didn’t just jam; this thing made a habit out of jamming just when you needed it the most. Soldiers going over the top in any attack that depended on the chauchat just knew it was going to fail. They weren’t being pessimistic, either. They knew it was a bad idea from bitter experience.

The space shuttle is designed the same way. Originally it was to be a completely reusable vehicle. Then, for some reason, a committee got together and suddenly, just the rocket boosters on the sides of the big main tank were reusable. The shuttle became a big kludge job. Martin Caidin, a former NASA engineer and the person who created the Six Million Dollar Man, remarked that the design of the space shuttle was the ‘act of a lunatic.’ And he said that in an interview with a small science-fiction fan magazine about a decade ago—a copy of which I just happen to have. Caidin’s whole point was that the space shuttle is a winged explosion waiting to happen.

Now this damn thing has killed 14 people and the word is that we will not replace the Columbia as we did the Challenger. Well, good. The design was goofy anyway. The Luddite is just grateful that we flew more than a hundred missions with it and got away with a death toll under 20. After the Challenger blew up, Newsweek magazine ran a cover story that said, among other things, that one of the problems at NASA was this culture of progress. This was a mindset so severe that a popular criticism of something that otherwise got the job done was “Well, it doesn’t advance the technology very much.” Apparently, no one shot back that something burning up on reentry doesn’t either.

There is a lot of talk about replacing the space shuttle fleet with something that is more up-to-date. That’s fine with me. The Endeavor, the replacement for the Challenger, cost something like $2 billion big ones. Why should we be spending that kind of money on a big firecracker? The only drawback to this approach is that the technology to replace the space shuttle is supposed to be ten years away; in other words, the space shuttle is all we’ve got until 2013. Meanwhile, we still have an orbiting space station to resupply and the space shuttle is the best bet to do that.

The effect of the dumb ‘well, it doesn’t advance the technology very much’ remark, is that the entire point of NASA is space exploration, not designing a better way to get there. The effect of the Columbia and Challenger explosions has been a lot of talk about humans not going into space anymore; that it’s too dangerous; that it’s too expensive; that the job can be done by robots, etc. Since the government is involved and the government is the sole entity rich enough to make space exploration possible, there is a very real possibility that this talk may bear fruit. [Note: This was written before the private enterprise-backed Space Ship One made its maiden voyage, and that thing never left the atmosphere, so if it never actually got into space, it couldn't really be called a 'spaceship.'] Whatever it may do in the future, the government will still be responsible for the deaths of the Columbia astronauts just like it is responsible for the deaths of those aboard Apollo I. That means it will have to DO something about it. People launching rockets from their back yards sure aren’t going to take up the slack.

People have a need to personally go and see what’s around the corner. This is not just an idle flight of fancy. It is very, very real. The Luddite recognizes this. For government to try and shut it off is not only nonsensical but perilous as well because unfulfilled, this need can be perverted. Bungee jumping is only the first ragged signpost on this road. Danger junkies have always been with us but only resentment toward the brigade that wants to put rounded corners on everything could fuel the desire to duplicate stunts from a movie like ‘Jackass.’

So The Luddite hopes that we won’t abandon space. It’s too big, too grand, and too important for us not to turn our attention to it. I think we should just look at the space shuttle as a mistake that is way overdue for a change. Do we belong Out There? Hell, we don’t even belong HERE, but mass suicide sure isn’t the answer; neither is giving up on space.

PDAs

PDA’s

The Luddite has never had a PDA. Ever.

PDA stands for, as I am sure you must know by now, Personal Digital Assistant. They used to be a little smaller than a brick. They have gotten smaller now. Their job was to hold phone numbers and little notes for retrieval later. Apple Computers developed it during the reign of the now-hated John Scully in the early 80s. I say this to point out that PDAs aren’t exactly new.

The first time I ever ran into a PDA was in the form of the Newton in the 80s. Remember those things? Newton’s were infamous for screwing up anything you wrote on them, sometimes with unintentionally hilarious results.

They were resuscitated in the late 90s in the form of the Palm Pilot. In order to write on one of these things, all you had to do was learn the shorthand that was included in a sticker under the lid. But that wasn’t the allure of the Palm Pilot. The allure was in the fact that it could accept information and phone numbers from OTHER Palm Pilots. Even though The Luddite missed out on this sort of thing, he could imagine high-class folk in bars ‘beaming’ their phone numbers to people they found attractive across the room, especially after a few martinis.

The Luddite is perfectly aware that the words ‘Palm Pilot’ refer to a specific product made by a company and that he should use the more generic ‘PDA,’ which he will. However, The Luddite does not have too much sympathy for this position as companies spend billions trying to associate their product with a certain function, like ‘kleenex.’ So they have to take any bad that comes their way along with the good.

New PDA’s also collect and play music and function as tape recorders. People used to walk around with little tape recorders up to their mouths, recording their thoughts—now they can do the same with PDAs—as if this guarantees we want to listen to them. Folks who can afford these things have to face one depressing fact—just because they made a lot of money doesn’t mean the thoughts they put down on tape are profound. A lot of the time they are the auditory equivalent of wheatgrass juice.

The big selling point I noticed of the PDA’s is that ‘if you lose that number on a piece of scratch paper, it’s gone.’ This summons inside me a great big feeling of ‘so what?’ Buying something that is going to cost me at least $69—which is the cheapest PDA I found on the web--is going to teach me to be less careless?

Maybe I travel in the wrong circles or maybe it’s the kind of thing you keep in it’s own little pouch, but I have never SEEN anyone with a PDA. This is something that just has to make the manufacturers sure happy. I see people with cel phones all the time, but I have never seen anyone with a PDA. I’m sure people have them, but I never SEE any. There must be some message here, but I don’t know what it might be.

As far as he is concerned, there is nothing a PDA does that cannot be done by a pen and a piece of scratch paper, which The Luddite is never without. It’s not as cool as a PDA, but The Luddite is past caring and figures that such a minimalist thing will be back in vogue soon. Plus, here’s is what The Luddite considers the clincher: The cost of The Luddite’s pen and scratch paper system is $4.99 or whatever a ream of paper that has already been through his printer once costs. The pen is a giveaway that The Luddite picked up on an interview. That is at least an additional $64.01 The Luddite can spend on booze. Many PDA’s go for more than that. I rest my case.

No Call List

No Call

The Luddite got a phone call from someone purporting to be at a nonprofit. Then he offered to help me with what he said was the terribly-high interest I was being charged for my credit cards the other night. Believe it or not, I had been expecting something like this.

Ever since Colorado put its no-call list into effect in April of 2002, The Luddite has been amusing himself wondering how scoundrels were going to get around the thing. I do that sometimes, something like the way John D. MacDonald used to think up accounting scams for his books.

In case you were busy at the time, Colorado’s legislators put in a law forbidding telemarketers to call anyone in the state unless they purchased a ‘no-call’ list of people who they couldn’t call under any circumstances. They got around to passing this law late in 2001, even though telemarketers had been interrupting people’s supper long before then. How bad was this problem? Well, the first week of eligibility for the list, 500,000 people wanted to sign up. You didn’t read that wrong. It was 500 thousand. Any misgivings The Luddite has ever had for the loathing that people in this country have for telemarketers was dispelled when I read that stat. If I’m overreacting, I’ve got lots of company. I wonder how much money the state will collect in fines.

Naturally, there were exceptions. Non-profits, newspapers, police associations. The very presence of exceptions made me wonder how long it was going to take for someone to figure out a way around the no-call list. The Luddite got a junk call from one of the exceptions on June 19, 2002. That’s about nine months since the no-call list was passed by the legislature. I’m not doctrinaire; I just think the whole point of the bill is to prevent interruptions. How is an exception not an interruption? I can barely wait to see what they come up with to ‘thwart’ spam.

If you think The Luddite despises telemarketers, you would be right. I’m on the no-call list; even though I didn’t think it would work. I have waged a long and unsuccessful battle against these thugs, which I will recount to anyone unfortunate enough to get within earshot. During this battle, I have pretended to be a befuddled old lady and a man with a hearing problem, all to no avail. I don’t hang up on them because I am convinced that as a species, we have a duty to keep these guys on the line as long as possible without buying anything, thereby giving them less time to annoy our fellow man.

In this long and bitter struggle, the only thing that has worked for me is telling them you have had a stroke. To my amazement, The Luddite heard the unmistakable sound of turning pages, a heartfelt apology and then a dial tone. Apparently they have no entry under ‘life-threatening illness’ in their script, yet they feel they have to say SOMEthing, so they fall back on ‘I’m sorry.’ The only bad thing about this approach is that you still have to answer the phone. Thus, my presence on the no-call list. Even though I was pessimistic about the thing working, hope sprang eternal. It might turn out to be another club in our bag, so to speak.

Now telemarketers use machines. The Luddite is now used to getting machines on the phone, but one calling me is still a novel experience. I guess somewhere in this land there are people so desperate for a call or so confused that they will pick up the phone and listen to a machine; even a sales pitch from a machine. What really freaks The Luddite out is that once on my answering machine there was a call from ANOTHER machine.

Oh I forgot. This wasn’t a sales pitch. It was a call from a nonprofit with an 800 number offering to help me reduce my interest rate if I just called them. Yeah, sure.

May I Help You?

May I Help You?

The Luddite has never really cared for the webpage as an informational tool. They don’t seem to contain a lot of information you want. Then again, maybe it’s because The Luddite has a lot in common with old men who can remember a time before color TV and simply mistrusts them.

This is harsh, but it’s true. Sometimes web pages don’t even contain a phone number, just an address, which strikes me as really weird for a medium that prides itself on speed.

If The Luddite sounds grumpy, I suppose it’s because he is. The Luddite once tried to find out what the horsepower is for a food processor he has because he needed a machine with one horsepower. The documentation that comes with the machine didn’t list what horsepower he had, so The Luddite tried the website for Black & Decker to find out just what it is. Forget it. If it’s there, it sure isn’t in the ‘appliances’ section.

Since Black & Decker’s website didn’t work, The Luddite tried the super Wal-Mart where he bought the thing in the first place. The Luddite knew what their answer was going to be, but he tried it anyway. Once they finally connected him with the department, a very nice woman hit him with what has been a very depressing and common phenomenon, i.e. “The person who knows the answer is not here right now, try back later.” The Luddite guesses that sounds a lot better than the blunt, “I don’t know.” The Luddite has run into this one before. When you call back to the person that knows the answer, you get the other half of the new trick, which is, “I don’t know why they said that, I sure don’t know.”

The Luddite also tried a small appliance repair store in Fort Collins, Shaveco. The guy who runs this place is a true eccentric, ready to rant about the ‘Throwaway Society’ at the drop of a hat. In fact, instead of business cards, he gives out little pieces of paper with little screeds about why everything breaks and nothing lasts. The Luddite likes him, even though he don’t know his name. The Luddite told the man in charge of his plight and said that he needed a food processor with about one horsepower. He laughed and said there was no such thing in the United States, even though the book The Luddite was looking at mentioned two models that put out that much power. The guy did tell The Luddite, however, that 350 watts--which is what his food processor has—is not a lot.

The Luddite finally got a semblance of an answer at Ace Hardware on College. He usually relies on Ace for this kind of thing because they are pretty helpful and forthright. If they don’t know the answer, they’ll say so and direct The Luddite to someone that does. The guy at Ace Hardware wasn’t sure but put the phone down so that he could look around for the answer and couldn’t find it. He did some comparisons of the wattage with other models he had in stock and figured that The Luddite had about 1/8th horsepower. He also urged The Luddite to come on down. He
didn’t then, but you can be sure that he will. He was great. [Update: I finally did. Ace didn’t have the horsepower but I now know there are two places in town with models that can get the job done. One if them is Jax, the local mercantile store and the other is at Bed, Bath and Beyond.]

More and more The Luddite is being faced with hired help that cheerfully, or sullenly says, “I don’t know.” After all, it’s just a job, the business isn’t theirs and why should they show ANY kind of loyalty to a business that will fire them at the drop of a hat when things get dicey? Yeah, yeah, The Luddite has heard all those reasons and even agrees with some of them, but what gets him is the total disregard for MY time; time that The Luddite is sure never going to get back.

This attitude seems to be prevalent on websites, which again, strikes The Luddite as weird for a medium that is supposed to put a premium on speed. Finding the horsepower of a food processor should be a relatively simple thing. There’s even an equation for it. The least they could do is put it on a website.

Telemarketers

Telemarketers

The Luddite believes that there is a special place in hell reserved for telemarketers; if there isn’t, there should be.

Telemarketers are the single biggest reason why The Luddite is suspicious of modern communications technology. If there is one thing that The Luddite loathes, it is making things more complicated than they really need to be. Telemarketers do this by messing with the simple act of answering the phone. This may sound hardass, but The Luddite firmly believes that the one thing he has a finite supply of is time and anything that wastes his stock of it is something to be reflexively hated. Telemarketers fit into this category. So do spammers, but that is a subject for another time. Besides, a true hardass would advocate that all telemarketers—and spammers, for that matter--be lined up against a wall and shot in the knees because their lives should be made just as difficult as they make ours.

The Luddite feels so strongly about this that he engages in behavior designed to keep telemarketers on the line as long as possible, not because he wants to talk to them or buy anything but because The Luddite believes that it is his duty to take up as much of THEIR time and they do of HIS. Also, The Luddite thinks it is the duty of everyone called by telemarketers to not hang up in disgust but to keep them on the phone as long as possible without buying anything. That way they will have less time to bother someone else and looking out for each other is simply neighborly.

The Luddite doesn’t even hear their pitch. Most of the time he simply verifies their identity, puts the phone down on the counter and only picks it up again when it begins beeping. Let them argue with Corian.

The Luddite is not alone in thinking this way. Colorado set up a ‘do not call’ list a couple of years ago and the people in charge of it were astounded by the number of people who called in via telephone or modem wanting to sign up. In fact, the response was so huge—860,000 people in the first three days—that the powers that be had to briefly shut it down in order to install new equipment that could handle the load. When contacted about it, telemarketers said the vehemence of the callers and the popularity of this list surprised them. To the layman, this is known as a ‘lie.’

Telemarketers simply had to know that as far as people are concerned, their PR image was worse than that of used car salesmen. It’s not as if the signs aren’t all there. They couldn’t not know. This year, the idea of a ‘do not call’ list went national. The federal no-call list has a reported 50 million people on it. Mrs. Luddite signed up for both services. She and I are not particularly vindictive, but The Luddite uses his phone in order to make a living and is tired of answering phone calls from people—now it’s someone who wants to reduce my credit card debt--hawking services he does not want and did not ask for.

A popular dodge is that wireless calls are not identified on caller ID, forcing The Luddite to answer them because he does not know who is on the other end. The Luddite used to answer blocked calls because he once heard from a Qwest representative that answering them, putting the phone down and only putting the phone back on it’s cradle when it beeped was a way of removing your phone number from the telemarketing computer. It didn’t work.

Now if he doesn’t know you, expect to hear from you, or you are on the ‘blocked calls’ list, prepare to hear The Luddite’s answering machine and never get a call back.

The Luddite has cynically wondered how telemarketers will get around the no-call list. A company calling from Arizona used a tactic The Luddite ran into last summer. It offered him a package at a ski resort as an inducement. According to a law librarian friend of The Luddite, this is being used more and more by companies because they can argue that they are not selling anything but instead giving something away when they call. The sales pitch comes later. Already a federal appeals court in Oklahoma has stopped the federal do-not-call list from taking effect next week on the grounds that the Federal Trade Commission overstepped it’s authority when it put the thing in place. (Ed. Note: The appeals court matter is now over and to be blunt, the outcome was that the telemarketers can go pound sand.) Here in Colorado, there is a judge who has ruled against the state do-not-call list on First Amendment grounds, claiming the law should include charities and all the exemptions as well and not single out businesses. It should not be too much of a surprise to say that The Luddite actually agrees with this argument. An interruption is an interruption, whether it comes from a newspaper soliciting funds or from someone in a windowless box reading a script about my credit card balances. What the judge is saying--metaphorically, of course-- is, ‘Kill ‘em all! Let God sort ‘em out!’ (Ed. Note: The telemarketers must have pissed off some judges too as they were sitting down to dinner because they lost this one too. Ah, silence.)

The no-call list seems to be having an effect. However, in the instances that it doesn’t, The Luddite follows an array of strategies for dealing with telemarketers. When one used to get a live voice on the other end of the phone, The Luddite would ask them to repeat their pitch over and over or pretend to be an old lady with a hearing problem. The Luddite kept one fellow on the phone for an exasperated six minutes before he muttered, “Aw to hell with it,” and hung up. Now that telemarketers are increasingly going to taped messages, the approach no longer works, although The Luddite is tempted to call one of those 800 numbers mentioned in the tapes and pretend to be a befuddled old lady looking for her children and bitching that they never write.

The Luddite increasingly relies on caller ID to weed out the chaff. The Luddite realizes this is using new technology to defeat another new technology, and looks upon the entire enterprise as ironic as hell, but his dislike of telemarketers leaves him no choice. The Luddite is thinking about putting them on hold, just to see if he can get away with it and how long they will stay there, but as yet he has no reliable way of timing them.

Another tactic that The Luddite follows is to listen to a telemarketer’s entire pitch and say that what they are selling sounds really useful and something that he really, really wants, right now. Then when he is asked for credit card information or asked if he wants to order, The Luddite says he is going to talk to the man’s competitor the next day but thanks him for the idea. Then he hangs up. The Luddite is not sure if this works, as he doesn’t associate with this type of people, preferring to hang in more respectable society, such as with panhandlers, hit men and pimps.

The only other method that The Luddite uses is ‘shunning,’ which the Amish employ. It is a form of ignoring people, which mandates that you have nothing to do with someone, including talking to them. The Luddite has tried that but cannot resist indulging in good old-fashioned verbal abuse. Once, he even told a telemarketer who declared that she had to eat that she should “get into a decent line of work” if she was hungry and should “come over for a tuna fish sandwich.” The Luddite has even reached into a child’s Halloween sack and yanked out a little boy’s treat because he recognized the kid’s mother, who had accompanied him to the door, as a telemarketer. Then he told the little boy he wasn’t getting anything because of Mommy’s job. Mommy was, to put it mildly, horrified. The drawback to this last approach is that it is too slow, outside of it being too hard on the soul. The Luddite realizes that this is letting the sins of the fathers trickle down to the children but he figures that since the children of Nazis put up with the same thing all their lives, it’s not like it’s without precedent.

Finally, The Luddite tells the person on the phone that he simply has no money, as in none. No matter how low they go, The Luddite says he has no money with which to pay them. It never used to work but now it seems to be accepted more and more, probably because of the state of the Economy. Depressingly enough, The Luddite has not had to lie yet.

Spammers

Spammers

About 85% of the mail in your e-mailbox is spam.

This doesn’t seem to surprise anyone; in fact it seems to be taken rather phlegmatically, in a way The Luddite finds disgusting.

The 85% figure comes from an organization called CAUCE, which stands for Citizens Against Unsolicited E-Mail. That percentage surprised The Luddite, as he thought it was a lot less, like maybe 55%.

When The Luddite was first entering the computer age—back when dial-ups were still the only way for ISPs to go—The Luddite said he wanted one that would filter out all the spam he was getting after he stupidly posted something to a Usenet group and was promptly targeted for all kinds of offers. The Computrons in charge at the ISP laughed at him.

They were very patient and very patronizing. They said spammers were very persistent and very smart; they were working all the time to hack the system; it was impossible to keep them out and so forth.

The Luddite got annoyed with their patronizing attitude and found himself saying, “Well, you guys are smart, too. Can’t you find a way to keep them out? After all, you’re smarter than them, aren’t you?” It turns out the quickest way to piss off a geek is to question their intelligence, which I had just done. Before they could order me to leave, a guy with a little bit of PR experience was wandering by at the time, saw what was going on and saved the day, at least for the company. He assured me that the company had those spammer swine on the run. So I opened an account with them.

In short, he blew an entire load of smoke up my ass. That was eight years ago and the company I was talking to doesn’t even exist anymore. The spammers are still there, however, sending their crap from China or Korea or wherever. What they don’t know and probably don’t care because spam is incredibly cheap, is that I can’t read their writing, so I couldn’t order something from them even if I wanted to. Whenever something with ideograms appears on my screen, I just delete it. I never see it.

In fact, hitting the ‘delete’ key over and over is what defenders of spam—and there are some—suggest you do. Delete, delete, delete…. how hard is that, they say.

Well, you tell me, The Luddite shoots back. How many hours of everyday do YOU spend clearing unsolicited ads for mortgages and prescription drugs and erection aids off YOUR computer?

I have a law librarian friend who lives in Oregon. She gets about 200 e-mails every couple of hours from lawyers, every one of which has to be gone through. She tells me she has to set aside at least a half-hour every morning just to wade through the junk and eliminate it. This does not even take in the viruses that malicious hackers try to slip in, but that’s another topic. What’s important is more than two-thirds of the e-mail she gets, is a waste of her time. This does not a communications medium make.

There seems to be an attempt to equate spam with junk mail, something else The Luddite loathes. However, equating it with junk mail is wrong. If you have mail that exceeds the capacity of your post office box, the post office will hold it for you until you can come and pick it up. E-mailboxes are different. You get charged for how big they are. Filling them up with spam is costing YOU money, not the advertiser. They might as well be selling stuff on your front lawn because you have a good location and not giving you a share of the proceeds.

One possibility is to force businesses to make everything opt-in rather than opt-out. In other words, the only way they can legally send you further e-mails is if you opt into a service, rather than automatically making you a member until you say otherwise. The Luddite believes this is how it works, but is not positive.

Another possibility that The Luddite has toyed with is prosecution. Not the spammers, they are too busy hiding for that; no, the companies that get advertised. Prosecute THEM. They have to have an address. Go after THEM. Follow the money.

There was something else; something dark and sinister that The Luddite saw on Slate.com. Maybe you saw it, too. It was a tongue-in-cheek suggestion—at least I HOPE it was tongue-in-cheek, but now I don’t know—that since hackers cause much more damage to society with their viruses than murderers do, they should be put to death. It was a very fact-laden, cold argument, fraught with cost-benefit analysis. It was also hard to argue with if you had most of your data corrupted by some pimply-faced, 14-year-old geek in New York City that was mad at the world because he’d been bullied that morning but wanted to demonstrate his power. That had to do with hackers, not spammers, but The Luddite is too pissed off right now to note the difference.

Labor Saving Devices

Labor Saving Devices

It’s been said of The Luddite that he does not care for technology and the new way of doing things; he either does not understand it or he secretly prays for the Old Days. The Luddite does not know how these calumnies get started.

What The Luddite is opposed to is the waste of his time because no more of it is being made. Make no mistake, The Luddite loves computers and new gadgets very much. He believes that they speed up things immeasurably. It’s when they go wrong that they become an immense pain and actually get in the way.

A perfect example of what The Luddite is talking about is a recent visit to one of the newspaper chains in The Luddite’s hometown. There were no reporters banging away at their keyboards in concentration, no shuffling through notes, and no organizing of contacts. In fact, there was little work being done at all. The reason? They were all waiting for the main computer to be restarted because there was some problem with it that had shut down everything.

No one pulled out a manual typewriter or even a yellow pad and organized his thoughts. That’s what the computer was for and since the computer had shut down, the people had, too.

The Luddite went through an upgrade of his own computer that took almost a month. The reasons for this are that The Luddite has gone from Windows 98 to Windows XP and there are all kinds of compatibility problems involved with the change. Also, things have been going slower because The Luddite does not want to shell out $70 an hour for a tech. Therefore he is having a computer-savvy friend make the changes. She is grimly determined to solve all the problems. She is making progress, but the daunting task of converting from 98 to XP is making things slow. At least the problems have not paralyzed her, as they had in the case of the newspaper minions in the first example. They were all slaves to the computer and believed that since it stopped, they should too.

Computrons will object to this, of course. If you talk to any of them, they make it very clear that if us proles would just learn how to use them correctly, computers wouldn’t give us such a bad time. In technical terms, this is what is called a ‘crock.’

But that is another matter. The defensiveness of computrons and the insistence of people to be slaves to their machines are fodder for other columns. Right now, The Luddite has another bone in his teeth and that is, when computers screw up, they really screw up.

The Luddite will not argue the point that computers speed things along; they do. It’s when they don’t work that things go awry. The computer upgrade has held up The Luddite simply because so many of his notes and files were on his hard disk but there was no way to get at them. And those are just the notes for writing. The upgrade has also prevented The Luddite from doing his taxes because he cannot run the tax software and because many of his records are on his hard drive. The Luddite suspects he is not alone. The entire Y2K fear [remember that thing?] had legs because computers were damn near omnipresent. The spectre of them shutting down or going haywire was pretty scary; so scary that the survivalist industry went great guns starting around 1996.

Computers are victims of their own successes. It’s because they do things so well that people think they can put all or most of their information on them. Consequently they can be very unforgiving when something goes wrong and you try to work around them. You almost have to involve them in a task like professional writing or accounting. When they don’t work, everything is brought to a screeching halt until the computer is fixed. Before, it took something like an office fire to cause that kind of paralysis; now it’s just a computer problem.

The Luddite wishes that computers were more dependable, or even more to the point, that people would not dislike their work so much that they use a downed computer as an excuse.

Cel Phones

Cel Phones
 
Maxim #1: Technology will out.
 
The Luddite knows that he is steadily approaching Old Fartdom. Even though he is not quite there yet, he still hopes he is at least au courant and can keep abreast of the latest developments.
 
As always, The Luddite is impressed with gadgetry and the capacity for which people can find a base use for the noble. The sterling example would have to be the use of the Internet in order to view porn. However, the news that some college students are using cell phones in order to cheat has got to be right up there with the Porn-Internet connection. Next thing you know, we’ll put a man on the moon…we did?…when?
 
Cel phones now have little screens via which you can silently send text messages. Some students facing a tough midterm at the University of Maryland were taking advantage of that fact to communicate with students on the outside, who were feeding them the correct answers. They could do this because professors had the habit of posting the answer key to their exam on the Internet once the test was underway. No doubt you can see the big fat hole in this approach. All a student would need was a cel phone and a buddy on the outside with access to the Internet. Not even the proctors, who patrolled up and down the aisles looking for cheating, caught on to this deception. Thus, Maxim #1 comes into effect.
 
But wait, the answer key posted on the Internet turned out to be a sting. The Forces of Good triumphed once more. Not only were the morally challenged students caught, but they got all the answers on the exam wrong, thereby looking like dolts, too.
 
This was regarded as an example of the kinds of technological problems that professors are now running up against. However, The Luddite sees this as an example of how dumb college students can get.  Yes, scofflaws have always tried to use technology in unexpected ways. When safes got too massive for dynamite, crooks in the 19th Century switched to nitroglycerine. The Luddite doesn’t think it is that profound. People are always thinking that they are the only ones taking advantage of cutting-edge technology but they aren’t alone. Look at John Dillinger; he never tried to escape the cops on horseback and look where it got him.
 
As far as the entire cel phone incident goes, the only question for The Luddite is what the hell cel phones were doing in the class in the first place. This seems like fertile ground for this kind of morally casual behavior. If anywhere a scheme like this was going to appear, it would have to be in a college classroom or Congress.
 
It reminds The Luddite of when calculators were first allowed during math finals. Teachers damned the calculator as an impending sign of the apocalypse and mercilessly mocked anybody who had one. Now that calculators are the size of credit cards and are being given away as premiums, they are being allowed into finals. The same thing will happen with cel phones, I suppose.
 
Maybe someone had already thought of this and it has been criticized as terribly low-tech and doesn’t really address the cell phone, but I would suggest not posting the test answer key on the Internet to begin with. It’s just an idea.