Tape, Glue Stick or Rubber Cement?

At this point in my life, I've been in the workforce for twenty-five years and have witnessed wondrous technological advances.

The fax machine, for example, was still making its awkward debut when I was indentured (I mean hired) by the Moore County Citizen News-Record to work as a newspaper reporter. To say budgets were a little tight at the Citizen would be like saying Ted Cruz is only slightly power hungry. A nickel didn't get spent without full consent of the managing editor, the editor-in-chief and my Mother giving written approval in triplicate. Consequently, the pricey thermal paper of early fax machines was a highly coveted item. You didn't dare scroll a superfluous inch of it unless you wanted to be violently chastised by the office controller.

When the fax machine started clicking, whirring, buzzing and bleeping to life, all activity in the office skidded to a halt. We stood around the fax room -- yes, the fax machine had its own private room -- like extras from "The Music Man" waiting for the WellsFargo wagon to start a comin' down the street.

"A fax came for me! I got a fax! Did you get a fax? No? I did!"

These days, the fax machine is looked on as a quaint and nearly irrelevant relic of bygone days, like the PalmPilot or handwritten thank you notes. The fax machine barely lasted as long as the lifespan of a really healthy cat.

Since 1990, workplaces have moved from clunkily networked computer terminals all linked to an outdated mainframe and one overworked laser printer, to everyone having their own laptops routed via wifi to dedicated Bluetooth printers. And if you needed to touch base with someone back then, you couldn't pull a smartphone out of your pocket for a quick video chat. You reached in your pocket for a quarter and found a pay phone.

Now, I'm not one of those curmudgeons who bemoans the loss of carefree, technology-free days. I like my smartphone, and my laptop, and my Bluetooth printers. I love carrying around eight days of music on a single device and being able to watch Harry Potter movies on my iPhone while traveling by plane from Raleigh to Columbus. If anything, I'm wondering why all processes and functions haven't embraced the advances of the past few decades.

Perhaps my greatest hope is to see technology impact the way I submit monthly expense reports, specifically the turning in of receipts.

At the beginning of each month, I sit at my desk and gather scraps of paper of various sizes that should match up to all the purchases I made during the previous month. At least one is usually missing, and sometimes five or six. In twenty-five years, I've probably submitted only one expense report for which I managed to find all the corresponding receipts.

Once gathered, I take out a pair of scissors and trim the excess edges from the receipts.

Why? Because when you have to tape all those little receipts to sheets of printer paper, you want to get as many on one sheet as possible. Why, you might ask, is it necessary to tape all those little receipts to printer paper and mail a huge bundle of papers halfway across the country? Because the expense report accounting process is stuck somewhere between Byzantine and kindergarten finger painting lessons. Even the antiquated fax machine is too high-tech to be part of this process.

In a day and age when my son can FaceTime his friends using a smartphone connected to high-speed internet via wireless router while sitting on the toilet, it amazes me that I am required to complete an important administrative task for which I have to make a choice between tape, glue stick and rubber cement.



© 2015 Mark Feggeler

Quaxting and Other Recent Advances

The problem with technology is its incessant constancy.

There once was a time -- our children and grandchildren will find it difficult to believe -- when being out of touch did not constitute a crisis of communication. Being out of touch did not mean cell towers had crumbled or satellites had plummeted from their orbits. It was a common occurrence, not a cause for filing missing person reports or raising the national security level to Orange.

If you left your house, you were out of touch. If you were driving from point A to point B, you were out of touch anywhere in between. If you were in school, at work, in a meeting, at lunch, in the bathroom, or at a movie, you were out of touch.

Out of touch was not a permanent condition. Once you got home, or to a place that had a phone, you magically became available again. You could borrow your friend's house phone to "check in" with your parents, or sit at your office desk and call whomever your heart desired to call. You were reachable, and so was anyone within reasonable distance of a telephone.

When we took vacations we didn't waste time uploading pictures to Facebook, or checking the latest trending tweets, or bitching about the weak 3G signal at the campground that kept us from streaming YouTube's latest viral videos. We played cards and built campfires. We made conversation. We were happy the toilets at the KOA campground were separated by walls. We visited waterfalls and wildernesses and skyscrapers and monuments, and we didn't have 98 megapixel high-resolution tablet cameras with which to capture our experiences. We had binoculars and Kodak Instamatic cameras with Flipflashes you hoped would fire when you snapped a picture. And wherever you were, mountains or city, highway or back country road, you were most decidedly out of touch.

But not anymore!

Thanks to cell phones and smart phones and email and Skype, we're never more than a megabyte away from each other. My coworkers can reach me via email at any time of any day, regardless of necessity. Our daughter can quack a complaint at her boyfriend via text -- a new skill we call "quaxting" -- without his having to be in the same county, let alone be aware of what he might have done to warrant her quaxting him in the first place. My son can even answer an iChat video call from his uncle while sitting on the toilet. Technology has broken down all walls, it seems, even the bathroom walls.

And the sense of urgency is spread evenly over all modes of communication to the extent every bing of a text or bong of an arriving email requires an immediate response. I used to laugh that my in-laws had a telephone in their bathroom. Now we might as well have suppository phones. One clench of a butt cheek answers it, another clench ends the call, and a good sneeze gets you through to 911.

Maybe by the time I'm old and gray I'll be able to put down the cell phone, turn off the video phone, shut down the internet service, and disconnect for a day or two. I better send out an email blast and post about on Facebook before I do, just so nobody sends the police to my door to check on me.



© 2012 Mark Feggeler

The Un-Help Line

Have you ever known the exact cause of a problem, but found yourself incapable of convincing the one person who is supposed to help you rectify it that you really do know what you're talking about?

This isn't the same as bringing your car to a mechanic, only to have that bizarre squealing sound stop two minutes before you get there. Equally annoying? Sure, just not the same thing. I'm talking about those times when you are dead certain, no question, not even the trace of a spark of a doubt in your mind. You know precisely what's going on and you can explain the situation so concisely and coherently that even a monkey could understand it.

If only monkeys manned the help lines.

Last week, when I couldn't access any of my employer's secure web tools, I did the first thing a remote office employee should do: I checked our router to make certain we had a live wireless signal in the house. We did. Next step was to see if the other computers in the house could access the wireless signal. They could. Third and final step was to reboot my work-supplied laptop, a trick that typically resolves 99.9% of its misbehavior. After the reboot, the problem persisted. Even though the laptop was picking up the wireless signal and I could dial in to the secure VPN, I still could not access my email or our intranet services.

Because of changes to our problem-reporting procedures, we can no longer circumvent our official IT help line and go directly to the people in charge of our IT department. I can understand how this makes life more pleasant and less chaotic for the people in charge of our IT department, but what it means for the rest of us is that we have to spend anywhere from an hour to an entire day futzing around with whomever answers the 800 help line before we eventually get transferred to the people in charge of our IT department.

I want to state at this time, for the record, that the person who answered the help line was as pleasant as pleasant can possibly be, and he really was trying his best to help me. That said, I wasn't filled with hope when he said "sometimes only the Shadow knows why things don't work right." Not only does he seem to lack confidence in his own problem-solving abilities, he's paraphrasing from a 1930s serialized radio show. Something tells me this guy might be a little long in the tooth.

When he asks me to explain my problem, I tell him the company's server must be down. He tells me this can't be the case since his computer uses the company's server and he isn't having any trouble. I tell him the company has a second server primarily for remote employees like me, and his voice immediately adopts the kind of tone one uses when in the vicinity of a homeless person who might be emotionally unstable.

Instead of getting out of his chair and conferring with the other IT help line staffers to see if any other remote employees have reported similar connectivity issues, he starts putting me through the expected paces.

Are you using a router?

Yes.

Can you unplug it, wait 60 seconds, then plug it back in?

I don't have to, because I can see by my other computers that the router is working.

I just have to rule out the router as the source of the problem.

Okay, since you're talking to me nicely, I will go through this ridiculously purposeless exercise for you.

Did reseting your router do anything?

Yes, now the the rest of my computers are offline.

Luckily for me, two steps shy of suggesting we wipe my hard drive of all files and restore the machine to its factory settings, the people around him intervened. Turns out the secondary server for remote employees had been down all morning. Go figure...



© 2011 Mark Feggeler

"Want I Was Askew For"

By the time I was a kid, jokes about the lack of flying cars and other futuristic technologies dreamed of in the earlier parts of the 20th century were already pretty well worn out.

For all the advancements of science and engineering, I try to keep in mind that decades of hard work by hundreds of thousands of people to develop modern computers seem to have culminated in my children's ability to play Monopoly on our iPad instead of on foldable cardboard.

Sure, I can swipe a shard of plastic through a machine that automatically deducts the correct amount from my checking account, but it doesn't change the fact I still have to wait for an under-paid, under-trained, under-enthusiastic part-time employee at the RDU Airport Breugger's Bagels to charge me way too much for a poorly made turkey sandwich. And, yes, for the fifth time, I do NOT want mayonnaise!

In a day and age when we can send people to the moon -- which I should already be able to book for my next vacation, according to the prognosticators of the 1960s -- shouldn't I be able to list thousands of ways in which trillions of dollars of NASA research has improved my health and minimized my ecological footprint on the Earth? So far, all I have to show for it is powdered drinks, cordless power tools, and the hope that I'll never need anti-shock trousers.

Communication seems to be the aspect of life most significantly impacted by the wonders of technology. I can listen to any song, or watch any movie, on my iPod while I'm traveling across the country at roughly two-thirds the speed of sound. Just so long as I don't try to do it while we're taxiing to or from the gate, or right after we take off, or during the last few minutes of our flight. In fact, if my flight is a short one, it's best if I limit my iPod use to the terminal. I can scrape the mayonnaise off my bagel while P!nk encourages me to be expletively perfect.

Phones have come a long way, as well. I remember when my father hung our first non-rotary phone in the kitchen. It was amazing. I'm fairly certain the buttons lit up. It had a stretchy cord long enough for me sit around the corner in the living room. And when we got our first cordless phone? We might as well have been the Jetsons!

Now we have the joys of modern cell phones. Through audio, text, internet browsing, photo sharing, video feeds, live feeds, and triangulated satelite navigation, I can keep in constant contact with the world.

I can even begin typing a blog about the woman at Breugger's Bagels (who ignored me while I tried to get her to understand I wanted the Asiago bagel instead of the Asiago softwich) while I'm standing right there in front of her. Unfortunately, the intuitive auto correct keeps trying to change every other word. Here is a sentence auto correct helped me type: "If we spec. Half the time listener to what im staying I MIG just get want I was askew for."

I wonder if Gutenberg -- German printing press inventor Johannes Gutenberg, not semi-beloved American actor Steve Guttenberg -- could ever have imagined such automated efficiency?



© 2011 Mark Feggeler

Sissy Hissy Fit

Most of the applications that transferred to the boys' new iPod Touches when we synched them on Friday were purchased by Our Daughter. Along with fun games like TapTap Revenge and Angry Birds, they gained unlimited access to Makeover Madness, Pet Shop Girl, and Emily's Dress Up & Shop.

The end result is that half of their storage space is taken up by "girlie" apps that have no business residing on a ten-year-old boy's iPod Touch. It simply isn't manly.

Ever since that initial synch, the Italian has informed me at odd times about which apps he wants deleted, despite the fact I've told him we would sit down and take off all the offending apps at one time. Honestly, he's lucky I remember his name. Does he really think I'm going to remember the names of the different applications he throws at me in passing?

Also, I don't understand nearly so much about technology as people think I do. I must look just nerdy enough for folks to think I'm a closet techie. I can PhotoShop your face into a group picture, or throw together a quick flyer, but I'm pretty useless beyond that.

Unfortunatley, the German seems to labor under the mistaken impression that I know why the 3G connection isn't automatically set to "on" and therefore causing one or two apps to not function. I don't have a clue. I'm more than 30 years older than the technology in question, so I do what any good parent does in this situation -- ask my 13-year-old daughter to fix it for him.

Last night, before the teenager came to the rescue, the German couldn't get a particular app to work, so he asked his brother if he could borrow his iPod to play a game. The Italian, who was in the shower at the time, said "No." When pressed for a reason why the German couldn't, he again said "No."

Both My Lovely Wife and I found this to be an unreasonable response, so we told the German to go ahead and use his brother's iPod. We would face the music when he got out of the shower. And such sweet music it was...

The Italian doesn't whine, he cries. Zero to full-on cry in 1.2 seconds, in fact. That's been the story his entire life, although in recent years we've gone from seven things to cry about every day, to only one or two things worth crying over each week. Apparently, this was one of those things.

"I told him to wait until I was out of the shower-er-er!" he cried.

"We told him he could use it."

A comical mixture of disbelief, betrayal and shock consumed his wet face. He retreated to his bedroom, in which one can safely assume he was lying face down on his bed and crying into his pillow. He eventually emerged, still tearful, still a throbbing in his voice, to chastise the German.

"Come here!" I ordered. He slowly made his way to me, one hand keeping his towel around his skinny frame and the other clutching his recovered iPod. "What is your problem?"

"I was playing a game and I didn't save it and now I have to repeat the last level all over again-ain-ain..."

"What game?" I asked. "What game is so important that you have to cry about it?"

He quickly pointed to the screen. "This one," he cried. But the move was so fast, I couldn't tell which app he pointed to.

"Which one?"

He pointed again, only this time he spoke a little more quietly. "This one."

I took hold of his hand and turned the iPod to get a better look at the all-important application. Sally's Spa... Yes, that's right. My 10-year-old son threw a massive hissy fit because he might have to replay the mani-pedi round in a game in which you design and run your own virtual spa.

It could be worse, I suppose. At least it wasn't the app for tracking menstrual cycles.



© 2011 Mark Feggeler