The Good Old Days

There never were any 'good old days.' The Luddite knows. He has been there. Those days weren't that old and they weren't all that good, either. AIDS was unheard of and sex was STILL hard to get.

This doesn't mean The Luddite thinks that the modern technological world is all that wonderful. There is plenty in it that sucks just as hard as some of the things that drove us nuts in the 70s. Any of you reading this right now who are in your early 20s, will hear the same crap around 2040 that The Luddite is hearing right now. People will say how wonderful it was when there were just DVDs and cel phones. Do yourself a big favor, walk up to whomever is saying something like that and wordlessly hit them in the mouth. You will be surprised at how much better you feel.

Take this blog for example. In The Luddite's time this would be known as a 'diary,' A 'journal' if you wanted to make it sound less like something you'd find in the bedroom of a 12-year-old girl under lock and key. You would have been thought of as something of a fruit for writing in one. Now these are called 'blogs.' The fruit image has faded but that doesn't make them any more readable. Most blogs have about as much substance to them as a sneeze in a Kleenex. The Luddite has read plenty of blogs and remembers enough of his old journal entries to wince at both.

And what has made blogs possible? The web. The ultimate resource tool. The time it came in handiest for The Luddite when he was trying to finish a hospice story on deadline, it was 11 p.m and The Luddite needed the figures for the incidences of the five most prevalent cancers in the United States. Boom! The Luddite used the web to access the National Cancer Society's website. This was a hell of a lot better than waiting the next morning to call someone at the reference desk at the Public Library for the stats, let me tell you. What a nifty gizmo. You sure wouldn't find anything like this back in the good old days. What do most of you use it for? Looking up porn. Just wait until 2040 rolls around and your children are hitting you over the head with that one.

"Wow," The Luddite's nephews say to him, "did you live when color TV came out?" Well, not exactly, is The Luddite's answer. There was color TV, but The Parents of The Luddite could not afford color television until about 1967, so we watched everything in black and white. The Luddite does however remember a time when there were only four channels on television and nothing was on then, either.

I don't miss LP's much at all. I miss the liner notes, which you could read without a magnifying glass, but that's about it. After playing CDs and then playing an old LP last year, I immediately noticed the difference. A few years ago, there were people saying that LPs had the same sound quality as CDs but that was only if you took them out of their covers while wearing white gloves, cleaned them fastidiously and only played them with special needles. Screw that. I just want to hear a song, not open a wing in a museum.

Yesterday, I was giving serious consideration to getting a DVD player, which annoyed me because all my movies are on VHS. I didn't get too mad about it, though, because I remember how much bragging some farts did when they got Betamax and you all know what a rousing success THAT was.

I don't know what cooking method the children of tomorrow are going to embrace while laughing at their parents and their affinity for the microwave oven, but I am sure it will come. The Luddite actually LIKES microwaves. He used to be out of luck when he forgot to defrost something for dinner and he used to boil water in a kettle. Now, in an emergency, he just turns to the microwave. Anyone who tells you that the kettle method was better when all you wanted was a cup of hot chocolate is mentally ill. Also, if you grew up in cold climes, as The Luddite did, the microwave was indispensible for boiling water to be thrown outside into the cold to see if it would still be liquid when it hit the ground or whether it would explode into snow first. Hey, we had a lot of time on our hands.

The National Service Center

I suppose that many of you haven’t dealt with the National Service Center.

I have, but that’s because I was naive enough to ask a question that should have stayed unasked. The depressing part is that's probably not the last time I make that mistake.

You have probably never heard of the NSC, as it involves snail-mail, something of which most of you have probably heard of but never actually used. If that is the case, you can just stop reading right now and play a video game or bang your goddam head against the wall or do whatever the hell it is you do. This will make no sense to you and I don't want to answer or even see dumbass replies innocently asking why I'm so upset. I don't wanna even see them, okay? Just the IDEA of you people is pissing me off.

Man, I am waiting for the day when one of you comes across a stamp and literally does not know what the hell it is. On that day, I am postive that America is doomed and the morons have officially taken over.

Technically, the NSC is not an example of new gadgetry. The gadgetry it uses has been around for some time, except for the computer. However, it IS an example of obstensibly 'improving' something that is not broken with something that was busted to begin with, something which never fails to annoy The Luddite. He hopes--well, suspects--that he is not alone.I imagine that the National Service Center was the brainchild of someone who got tired of answering the same question for the umpteenth time.

For those of you who don’t know, the National Service Center has been set up nationwide to take advantage of technology when confronted with common questions, such as “Yeah. Uh, can you tell me what my state capitol is? I uh…forgot.” Yeah, sure. You know damn well anyone who asks a question that way is settling a bar bet.

The NSC is what you get when you call the Department of Labor, or the Department of the Interior or the Post Office or the Pony Express or whatever. Sometimes you can get around it, such as when you call someone in the basement at the Census Bureau who is so happy to hear from another human being that he does everything but offer to cook dinner for you at his home, but it’s not easy. I think the original purpose was to consolidate information requests through one clearinghouse and to get people with annoying questions to go away. It does the latter task beautifully.

When you have a question about something that isn’t on the phone menu at the National Service Center, you are fucked. Seriously. You get this feeling of being in one of life’s horrible moments, like finding your child floating facedown in the swimming pool and not knowing CPR. You can’t get anyone to help and you don’t know what to do next.

The first time I ran into the National Service Center was a few years ago, when I tried to call the Post Office. I got two conflicting rates for a Christmas package, so I tried to call the bulk mail center at my local post office to clear the whole thing up. I got the National Service Center instead.

This happened in 1999, I think. The National Service Center was still getting its legs underneath it and you could get a human being to talk to. I got a guy who not only couldn’t answer my question, but also refused to connect me with his superior or even tell me where he was. (He’s probably working for GE right now in their unhelpful customer service department.) I called back after hanging up on the nervous guy and got a very helpful woman from Denver who looked on her computer screen and promptly gave me the wrong rate information (I know this because it sounded weird and because of what I subsequently did) and told me that all calls to the Post Office would now be going through the National Service Center. This is like telling Alice that she’ll be only be going on a little trip down that rabbit hole.

I said thank you and called a post office in a small town that is now southwest of me. I called them because I suspected the rate the very helpful woman had given me was wrong and because I knew that this post office was small enough to escape notice by the NSC. I got a very nice man on the phone who gave me the correct rate, tout suite. I know it was the correct rate because I drove out there to mail my package. He took it away and mailed it without correcting anything. I didn’t have to wait in line; I didn’t have to answer a bunch of questions; I just mailed the box, which is what I wanted to do before I had the misfortune of dealing with the National Service Center.

Well, what the hell. It was just getting started, right? Unfortunately, this was not the extent of my dealings with the goddamn National Service Center. The second time I dealt with it involved a change-of-address and believe it or not, is too long to go into and amazes me to this fucking day. The third time, I was living in a condominium and wanted to report a broken door on a parcel delivery box. I tried to call the a nearby station but forgot about the NSC. I got them instead. I cursed because I knew a human being wasn’t going to be on the other end for some time. I wasn’t prepared for the fact that I never GOT a human being. I was on the phone for 18 minutes, trying to push the right buttons.

(I am not vindictive and I don’t know who invented phone tree technology, but I hope their kids get beaten up on the way home from school right after they tell their classmates what Daddy does for a living. Here’s a useful message: People who use telephones don’t wanna get phone trees or machines of any kind on the other end. They hate them. They’re busy too. That’s why they use the phone instead of coming over. Getting a machine is like being told--very nicely--to go pound sand.)

I can just imagine the poor swine that actually have to answer zip code requests every day. They would actually welcome a broken door report just for the variety. The National Service Center is probably a godsend for them. However, they don’t get to call the NSC; we do. The NSC is probably great when you ask about addresses or zip codes or hours, or that kind of thing. But the NSC is worse than useless when you have to ask a question that isn't on its phone tree menu, or when it screws up. No kidding. The machine asked me for my zip code the first time I dealt with it and it told me my home post office was in Washington, D.C. Even gave me its hours of operation, too. Trouble is, I live in Colorado.

Reporting a busted door should take about what? Two minutes, max? The NSC turned it into a Holy Chore. I don’t know what’s worse: Someone taking up your time trying to be uselessly helpful or someone taking up your time to be maliciously destructive. I used to think it was number two. Now I don’t know anymore.

There is something pernicious at work here. That door had been broken for a month and I couldn't figure out why it had just sat there. Now after dealing with the NSC, I think I know why. The NSC made it as difficult as possible to report that damn broken door. You want to be a decent person and all but after dealing with the NSC you got the feeling, 'why even report the damn thing in the first place?' Mail carriers must see it every day. Let THEM report it to the post office. After all, it’s THEIR door.

There’s another reason I bring this up. The first time I dealt with the National Service Center, I hung up, snarling. It was my tax money that was being spent on this equivalent of a screen door in a submarine. So I called Rep. Bob Schaffer’s office to complain about it. My congressman.

Bob wasn’t in just then. Instead, I got a fellow offering to put me on a list of people the Congressman would call when he addressed my problem, so I gave him my name and number. Let’s see if he’s one of those guys who just complains about the government or actually DOES something.

Well, that was five years ago. I think Bob's run out of time. I haven’t heard from him or from one of his aides. Neither has anyone in my family. Bob sure didn’t leave a message. Oh, what the hell, he isn’t even in office anymore and I don’t even get my mail in the box with the busted door. Screw it.

Digital Cameras

The Luddite does not have a digital camera. In fact, he has an old Pentax K-1000 that still uses film and it not automated at all. I take that back, there is a light meter in the thing and that is powered by a battery but technically, the K-1000 is not considered a powered camera.

As a matter of fact, it's considered by Pentax, which stopped making the thing in 1997, as a bare-bones camera. You can see one here if you want:

http://www.ne.jp/asahi/japan/manual-camera/k10001.htm

You want lights? Stare at a christmas tree. The K-1000 does not DO lights. What it did do, and still does in the case of mine, is take great pictures. Furthermore, in a world of plasticized shit that is supposed to break, I bought my K-1000 in 1977 and it's still going strong. You heard me. Nineteen Seventy-Fucking Seven. Twenty-seven by-God years ago. They made lenses out of metal then. Mine is so solid that I could beat an attacking wolverine to death with it and it would probably still work. The Luddite does not necessarily pine for the good old days but hey, there was a time when you couldn't dent the fender of a car with a sneaker and that should be respected.

Unfortunately, The Luddite will probably have to give up on film, simply because it days are numbered and The Luddite is not one to command the sun to stand still or the tide to go out. (Those are historical and literary references. Don't you people read anything but PC World and TV Guide, for God's sake?)

Anyway, The Luddite will have to buy something digital, I imagine, and a digital whatever to house the chip so I can broadcast the contents to my editors. I have come to this decision because of an interview in which I shot what have to be two of the lousiest pictures I have ever taken in my life. I am not kidding. I made the woman, who I would guess is in her early 40's at the most, look like she is 65 in one picture and a model for Edvard Munch's 'The Scream,' in a second. I made her look like a fucking gargoyle. On two separate churches.

You are taught in photojournalism to take lots of shots just in case of this eventuality, which I did. And in every goddam one of them, something was wrong. My wife is now with the negatives and her copy of Photo Shop in her photo lab and is putting the eyes from one picture into the eyesockets of another. In this instance the eyes should counteract the sleepy expression that is on the face of the woman in the one usable picture on the roll. I hope it works because if it doesn't, I am royally screwed.

This wouldn't be a problem if I had a digital camera. I could take the shot, look at a preview of it on the back of the camera and erase it and shoot a fresh one if I had to. You can't do that with film. The medium is permanent. Outside of the subject closing his or her eyes when you trip the shutter, everything happens so fast that it is almost impossible for you to know what you got.

After you shoot a couple of hundred pictures, you develop a kind of gut feeling as to whether or not the shot is good, but that's not the same thing as being able to preview it and see for sure. I was working with a short roll too; twelve exposures at the most, and I didn't have a lot of room for error. Also, I had been on the shelf with a brain aneurism for four years and I was out of practice. In one of the aforementioned 'gargoyle' pictures, my instincts were great. I got a vertical shot of my subject while she was lecturing people on chocolate. She was holding an 11-pound bar of Belgian baking chocolate against her chest. The thing was as big as a wooden cutting board. I am not exaggerating. The composition was great, the color was great, the sharpness was superb, the flash produced almost no shadow.

Then you got to her face. Everyone is sensitive about how they look on film. A picture is never quite right. People always demur, "I look terrible," or "I don't take good pictures." Those excuses are always overblown.

Except in this case. This was a perfectly good picture. I mean, how many times do you see someone cradling an 11-pound chocolate bar? Then your eyes float up to her face and see that weird, open-mouthed contortion, her head tilted back and her eyes looking down at you through the bottoms of her glasses. I kept looking at it, trying to find a way to make it work and there was just no way. Every time I looked at it, the immensity of my screwup just came and hit me right between the eyes.

So to avoid future screwups of this kind, I am probably going to have to get a digital camera. Someone wrote that America is a land of second chances, anyway. At least my camera can be the same way.