16. Promises, promises
“Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, allowing us to do things more quickly and efficiently. But too often it seems to make things harder, leaving us with fifty-button remote controls, digital cameras with hundreds of mysterious features and book-length manuals, and cars with dashboard systems worthy of the space shuttle.” – James Surowiecki
I gave a few details of my computer life, not mentioning eight years of teaching high school math. I followed that by working at a food corporation in White Plains, New York, in the summer of 1975. My workweek was 37 and a half hours with a summer benefit. If you had accumulated the required hours by one p. m. on Friday afternoon, you could leave and not return until the next Monday. We also received a discount at the company store – a great benefit for people who loved food. All employees appreciated the summer hours and those other benefits, especially me.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, management wasn’t so kind to the workers, who slaved for sixty hours each week or more. Children were forced on the job for just as many hours. Working and living conditions were horrible and the pay was minimal. I don’t know how owners of the mines and factories slept at night. The unions helped considerably but many employees were killed on the job or while on strike for shorter hours, decent wages and a few benefits. Eventually there was a forty hour week and as you can see from my experience in the 1970s, that shrunk even further. With the computer age, the workweek went back to forty hours and now it’s even higher. The words for this technological change can only be disaster, failure and disappointment.
The opportunity for more leisure and fewer hours on the job was exactly the promise made by companies years before because of technological advances. Machines made people’s lives easier. The washing machine replaced the washboard to the delight of many. The dishwasher was welcome by households, even if you had to rinse the plates first. That issue could have been solved by increasing the water pressure, such as that of the hoses used in the 1960s against the Civil Rights movement. There were numerous other devices that came along.
After a few years, I was doing well at the first business corporation that employed me. One day, the programming department manager ushered me into his office. Praising my work, he offered a great opportunity: I could learn a new system at the company, but the hours would be longer, without a raise. I told him I’d think about it. Before I left his office, I knew my answer. When I saw him a week later, I mentioned that I liked being with the order entry team and would stay there. I didn’t add that I hated a few of the company’s products, which weren’t test marketed enough. I stayed at that company for less than four years before I became a consultant. As time went on, I realized that technology had not lived up to its promise.
In February 2015, I really became caught up in the technology mentality. You know what I’m talking about. Being so used to the undo process with computers, you start looking for that option in your home after you say something or are cooking a dish. It’s not an option. That day I wanted to save two recipes from a co-op newsletter. They were on adjacent pages so I cut the smaller one and did the scan after placing it next to the other – both could be scanned and I could print out the page having both recipes. I did the scan and should have saved it to another document. Then I should have done a print preview since I only wanted a single page, which the document should have been on. Instead my printer produced two pages. It was difficult to read either. I needed to replace the cartridge. Actually I didn’t have to do all that. I already cut out the smaller recipe and should have done the some with the other. Scanning and printing was a huge waste of time. Sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees. That reminds me: technology should save oak and maple trees, not destroy them.
A few days before that I wanted to print a label for a correspondence. I used an address file and merged it with a label file. Those familiar with the procedure know what this involves and the others need not be concerned about it, as you will soon see. I do this because I have more labels that I will ever need and also because it saves time when a half dozen or more have to be printed. Every bet is off when one label needs to be printed. In this case, technology fails big time. Just use a pen and fill it out and save time.
Even when doing a page of address facilitators, you can run into frustrations as I saw. I’ve had the two files to be merged set up for some time when one day the merge failed. The files didn’t work as a team. The address file was OK, but the other document needed to be set up again. I did that and the merge worked. A few days later, I ran into the same problem. Again, more work was needed, but I think it should work from now on. When the simple process is functioning properly, you press merge, press merge again and then again and you’ll have the labels. You probably should say a prayer.
Referring to a few pages ago when I mentioned my summer benefits at the food corporation, while writing this book, I was doing a document check for this sentence: My workweek was 37 1/2 hours a week with a summer benefit. I saw this message: Hyphen Use (consider revising). I still don’t see any hyphen anywhere in those eleven words. It wasn’t that long ago I saw my ophthalmologist.
Chapter 14 had a few questions that I posed. Here are the answers: Gladys Gooding played the organ at Madison Square Garden for the Knicks and Rangers. She played at Ebbets Field for the Dodgers. That baseball game with the score 4-3, was a women’s softball game. Frank wouldn’t have been ninety feet from home plate and ready to score except that the left fielder threw his glove at the ball. I’m not sure if this archaic rule is still around, but you won’t see players tossing gloves since crazy glue keeps them on their hands. The next two questions are tough ones. The word I’m looking for is nth, as in to the nth degree. Math people had an unfair advantage with this one, but then the English majors reversed that with question five. There are quite a few words with all five vowels, including those in the order in which they appear in the alphabet. One is facetious. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious has all the vowels, but not in the right order.
If you had all these questions right, you may not be a genius but you’re not tied into the system. You use creative thinking. Computers may help you with some of these questions, but it could take a while as technology has pointed out. Actually causing more problems at times, those monsters don’t have all the answers. They can be programmed to do well in chess, but they won’t beat the chess grandmasters all the time. Is that classification given to those people because they paid off the chess commission or the match judges with a few thousand bucks, say four grand? Computers are machines – which break down – created and programmed by human beings, who are flawed in some ways. Don’t expect perfection. Emo Philips said, A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kickboxing.
“Promises, promises” is a song by Burt Bacharach and can be heard in the second act of the musical of the same name. The play, which opened on Broadway in 1968, is based on the 1960 movie, The Apartment and not connected to the 1963 movie, Promises, promises. The album garnered a Grammy for best cast recording, while Dionne Warwick benefited from two songs that became hit singles for her.