OMG It’s Been Almost 50 Years

Editor’s Note: (Except I’m the editor.) I haven’t posted lately because a I’ve been feuding/negotiating with my web host, called Wix. No one clicked on my last post, “Bainbridge Mommies”, which had never happened before. To make a long story short, according to Wix, if you fail to click on my notifications five times in a row, they regally anoint you “inactive”, without any notice to anyone, including me, and then you don’t get notifications.

This sad fate befell a full 11 of my faithful (or sort of faithful) readers, who, you can imagine, I’ve contacted separately.

I had no idea; that concept is embodied nowhere in the site’s technical instructions.

I have no idea who thought this was a Good Thing.

Furthermore, they can’t change it. I asked what the hey, and their answer was that making casual users inactive was actually helpful to my “reputation.” I retorted that I had no reputation to speak of. It apparently has to do with what they called “stats.” OK. The only “stat” I understand is if you get two hits in seven at-bats, you’re hitting .286, and I’ve known that since I was nine.

So, if you remain interested in this blog, you might consider clicking on the notification email at least once or twice for every five posts. I’m terribly sorry about this, but, short of writing some code for them, I can’t do anything about it. Big Tech!

So let’s get on with it….

This is not going to be an old man’s get-off-my-lawn screed. This is going to be more about how my head is reeling with what’s happened. It’s all magic. Let’s compare life now with life 45 years ago. I was finishing my MFA and about to go teach freshman comp and lit surveys at Auburn University.

A note: we won’t discuss obviously topical matters, like phones and devices whose status is so ambiguous as to be androgynous: is it a laptop? A tablet? An iPod? A calculator? A phone? We won’t discuss driverless cars, into which I will never place myself. Etc. Instead, let’s talk about some things we’ve forgotten.

Like Brett Kavanagh, I used to like beer, though the last I checked, he still does. I especially liked maybe ten brilliantly shiny cans a night on weekends. Today, you walk into the store, pick up a case or two, and buy it with your card. In 1976, grocery stores didn’t generally accept credit cards. In a lot of states, grocery stores couldn’t even sell beer.

So, for instance, to incite an alcohol-induced midnight (naked) swim somewhere, you had to think ahead. There were no ATM machines. You had to crack the door of a bank on a Friday afternoon, walk up to a teller, and write a check for cash, with her (almost always “her” back then) staring and knowing you were up to no good. And it had to be enough even if feckless Brian came to town.

Just a few years later, a law school colleague named Oscar had to stop at every ATM his buddies passed so he could take out $5.00 for another drink. Lots of ATM’s around by then.

Next. I wrote my master’s thesis for my MFA in creative writing on an electric typewriter so violent that I thought that it would kill itself. When I hit the button to send the carriage back to a new line, it slammed viciously into the chassis so viciously that the typewriter actually jumped a way across the desk. It never occurred to me to get anything to mitigate the sliding around, like a rubber mat.

The rule too was that you were allowed only one typo per page, whited out, of course.

Reflect on the tension you’d feel getting down to the bottom of the page with no errors. Your tension rising as the typewriter slams back to begin the last line, and then—damn! a typo—grab the white-out, gently brush away the offending letter, blow on the liquid paper to dry it, and then type the correct letter. And then affect nonchalance as you try to finish the last line with no other error.

Faithful readers, once in a while I choked. I did. In the last line, I mashed another typo, ripped the paper out of the paper bar, ripped it in half just for show, grabbed another sheet of paper, and started typing again.

I got to know that goddamn master’s thesis a little too well. It wasn’t very good.

And now, remember fax machines? The only industries to use it now are insurance companies, pharmacies, and doctors’ offices, which are connected, of course. Way back as late as 1989, my boss in our law firm, a partner named Betsy, was flying from our firm in North Carolina to Pennsylvania to close a purchase of our North Carolina client by a Pennsylvania behemoth. The purchase agreement was in the tens of pages.

It was a Saturday, and Betsy was packing up files, pens, legal pads, staples, the stapler, an instrument of medieval torture into her briefcase, when the fax machine began to mumble. Then it roared to life, and, like the mindless machine that it was, began churning out page after page after page, ten, twenty, thirty.

It was the Agreement of Purchase and Sale. You probably remember how we used to stand and stare at the fax machine, like a devotee at the shrine of a prophet, waiting for wisdom. Finally, if you were a lawyer, you realized that it was a rather a silly use of your extremely billable time to be staring at a fax machine. The fax would either come through or it wouldn’t. So you’d jerk yourself away from the scene and find something billable to do.

Betsy had to go, now, to the airport. Lawyers couldn’t be missing planes. She grabbed what had gathered at the machine: 30 pages. “There will be at least 30 or 40 more,” she said, “before exhibits. Oh well, I gotta go.”

“Shall we fax the rest to you?” some paralegal with an excellent sense of humor yelled after her. Betsy’s sense of irony was limited to situations that she could totally control. She didn’t answer as she strode down the hall, tall in her high heels. OK, right, this was 1987. Heels! She also usually had three or four cigarettes going at once.

One more: when I was at that same law firm, they had this quaint notion that each new associate should do one of about everything: a will, a real estate transaction, an agreement, everything in litigation, some sort of domestic law problem, a criminal case (which we generally fulfilled by making a partner’s son’s traffic ticket go away), I don’t recall what all. It was silly, an invitation to malpractice, a waste of everyone’s time. An approach to practice that hasn’t much survived the ‘80’s, it wasn’t much in vogue even then.

One day when I was supposed to be working with Betsy on a real estate limited partnership, I took time to work on a brief. I told Betsy I was going to go home to work on it without distractions (like her).

“You know you can’t just send it to a machine here at the office,” she informed me.

Really? “Sure,” I said. “I’ll just copy it to a floppy and bring it in.”

She nodded, giving up like so so many bosses have done on making me stay at the office, and walked away. People are always walking away on me; that anyway has never changed.

I went home and got to serious work. Within minutes, I was hot on my theme of what sheep-eating dogs plaintiffs were, writing lines like, “This is the sort of motion that makes the public hate lawyers.” (I actually wrote that; a partner who was an expert in ethics made me cut it.)

Then, in the middle of my fervor, I heard a distant “BOOM” and my screen went black. Fuck. I’d lost seven pages of prose that would otherwise have survived forever in legal history and lore.

I had to start over; back then, a desktop computer didn’t automatically save your work. The revision didn’t rage, and rage again against the injustice like the original. Later, I drove back to the office, floppy in hand, and saved it to our system. Today of course I could simply log on remotely.

It’s notable that there were two related innovations in this story: computers replacing typewriters and remote systems replacing local ones. After 45 years of this, I am dazed. How did all of this happen? What came first? How did all of this happen? Who was thinking so hard and engineering such advances when I was swilling 10 beers? How did a person of my limited technical understanding manage to follow along?

OK: here’s where I’m drawing the line, falling behind, losing the thread, left at the gate: Nancy has figured out how you can just tap your credit card on some other little machine and pay for your latte. Fuck and no. That’s supernatural magic, kids, and you can count me out on that before some other ingenious machine sends me straight to Hell. I am done. I don’t pay anything with paper checks, and I think, after all of this exhausting change, I shouldn’t be asked to do anything else. Get off of my yard.

This typing element voluntarily threw itself into the garbage after being forced to type my master's thesis.