Resuming life after the worst of the pandemic, I feel as though I’ve entered an alien world. While many things were shut down, so much sped up. I find myself identifying with the speaker in William Butler Yeats’ poem “Sailing to Byzantium” who says, “That is no country for old men.”
But it’s not the sensuousness of the world— “The young in one another’s arms” —that bothers me; it’s that the young are in the arms of technology and I’m not part of the hug—nor do I want to be.
In early summer I needed to fill out a building permit application. Not a problem; I would stop in at Town Hall and pick one up. But no, residents can no longer fill out a hard copy; everything is done online. Those words fill me with trepidation. I have spent 99% of my life off-line or with a choice and now there is only one line to be in. Well, OK, I can do that. But I couldn’t. Every time I got to the end of the application, a line of red type would appear saying something was incorrect. Completely frustrated, I called Town Hall. Thank goodness for a pleasant, patient person. In exploring possible errors, she asked if I had put a comma in the number of square feet I had reported. “Of course,” I answered. I didn’t spend 30 years correcting students’ comma usage for nothing. But that was the problem: My attention to correct punctuation had caused the computer to reject my application.
The other day I went to a CVS. At the checkout, there were three lines—one with a salesperson at the end and two with machines, which seemed totally backward. Twice as many people want to interact with a machine than with a person? For one crazed moment, I thought maybe I could try the self checkout. I was brought back to my senses as I watched a customer make a mistake, causing the machine to make a beeping sound, the line of people behind to glare in annoyance, and an employee to hustle over to solve the problem. I didn’t want to be that person, but how long will it be before every line has a machine at its end?
I had gotten used to the parking lot machines at the office building of Emerson Hospital so when I was there recently, I was dismayed at the ticket that came out at the entrance. It was a thin slip of paper with an imprint I sort of recognized. I fretted about how I could slide it into the exit machine, and when I gave it to the receptionist to be validated, she returned it with no stamp, which worried me more. Not wanting to be humiliated by the exit machine and a line of cars honking behind me, I asked a young man in the lobby how my ticket worked, and he patiently told me I just hold up the slip of paper in front of the machine. Of course, silly me.
As if to make up for the impersonal, no-option technologies that make me feel stupid, there are those that try to be helpful but insult my intelligence even more. I have gotten used to autocorrect, which is very annoying except when its “correction” makes for something hilarious. (I was letting a friend know that my granddaughter had left for Portland and brought most of her stuff up there. Rereading, I was surprised to see that my granddaughter had “brought most of herself up there,” begging the question of what of herself had been left behind.) But recently, what must be an “update” appeared on a text. Below the message were multiple choice options for an answer, like “sure,” “no problem,” or “I agree.” Does my phone think I am incapable of thinking up my own response or too lazy to type it? Out of principle, I will never use a machine-made answer.
And with an increasing number of machines I don’t know how to use or that make my blood pressure rise, and a decreasing number of people with whom to interact on everyday errands, “no problem” is about the last response I’d ever come up with.
