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parked on the street or in convenient alleys all day. Nobody ever touched it.
I wanted a washer and dryer for a town house that I bought some years ago in
Florida, but balked at the
Starship
Enterprise panel arrays and instruction manuals the size of the Manhattan
phone book for the machines in Wards' showroom. Mastering them would surely
require a pilot's license. (And anyway, no guy has things labeled "Delicate,"
et cetera in his wardrobe, or is going to mince around sorting his laundry
into ten loads of four items each.) So I traced down the people who supplied
the machines to the laundromat I'd been using to see if they would sell me
ones that just had the couple of switches
(Hot-Warm-Cold; High-Medium-Low) that I was used to. They did and could supply
them without the coin mechanisms. The machines were industrial grade and would
come out best in an encounter with an Abrams battle tank. I was happy.
The combined washer-dryer in the flat I had over the pizza parlor in Ireland,
however, was something else, with directions that might as well be in Swahili
for all the sense I could make of them. So when the repairman came from the
same supplier to fix the stove, I had him set up all the numbers and programs
and options. From then on I could just hit "On/Off" and leave the rest alone.
Visitors despair when they see childproof bottles in my bathroom with the tops
hacked off and the necks stuffed with tissue. The geniuses who design these
things live in an unreal world inhabited only by incurious and inept young
children and alert, fully functional adults. It doesn't include crotchety
60-year-olds half awake with a hangover at six o'clock in the morning, who
can't remember where they put their glasses. My kitchen is a war zone of
sliced and mangled boxes that refused to yield along the dotted lines, gouged
containers with the easy-open tops still solidly in place, and resealable
packages that wouldn't. I scour yard sales for "dumb" appliances that just
work and do nothing else engineered in metal and fixed with screws, not pieces
of pressed-together plastic with hidden catches to come apart like some
Chinese puzzle that can never be reassembled. I have the hotel desk give me
wake-up calls rather than attempt decoding the digital clock radio, while my
own alarm at home has rotary hands, the way God intended, and is driven by
clockwork, which by definition is what clocks were supposed to be.
Perhaps all this is Nature's way of leading us to the realization that the
world needs teenagers. Those collections of gangly frames, splayed limbs, and
toothy grins that we used to think of as assemblages of
leftovers from the Creation with no practical use turn out to be indispensable
to our survival. What is mindless irritation to us, becomes for the kids a
boundless source of the delights of meeting challenge, demonstrating
competence and virtuosity, and savoring the heady taste of achievement.
Finicky and time-consuming? They have a lifetime of time; boredom is their
enemy. Those intelligent "agents" we read about that will cruise the Web for
us, applying personalized profiles of our interests and tastes, and
communicate back in intelligible (well, almost) English are already here! The
old joke about them being the only mortals (the geeks in manufacturers'
back-room labs don't count as belonging to the real world)
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
capable of programming a VCR is not only true; it's scary. I've watched them
create intricate databases by just playing with the software, making it a game
in which opening the manual would spoil the fun like asking directions in the
ways women can never understand, or copying the answers to a crossword from
the solution at the back of the book. They revel in SUVs loaded with
everything, and can click their way unerringly through a tree of Windows
settings faster than I can follow with the eye, at the same time, as if just
to rub it in, nonchalantly carrying on a conversation over a shoulder.
And maybe there's a good reason why it's all that way. It makes the bonds of
dependency between generations two-way, creating cohesion in society. We the
older crew are finally force-fed a little of that humility that we've always
been told would be good for us, but nothing else so far in life has succeeded
in persuading us to try. The kids get to develop the confidence and sense of
adequacy that they're going to need a whole lot of before they really get into
the thick of life.
There comes a time when the effort to keep abreast of the latest versions and
on top of all the updates that will be history a year from now just isn't
worth it anymore. It's time to pay attention to other things in life that
never change and were there all along. Playing chess (that's the one where you
push pieces of wood around on a board; the excitement is all in the mind;
doesn't even need batteries) with the boys is more exciting than endlessly
mowing down suicidally inclined monsters in mazes. I've even found time to
take up the piano.
People talk about getting "over the hill," and they worry. I think they have
what Americans call an attitude problem. What happens when you get over the
hill on a bike? All the hard stuff is over, right?
You can sit back, enjoy the view, and let gravity do the work. Life is no
different. There's wisdom and justice in the ways of the world after all.
Children Need To Get Out
And Play
From the Web Site
Bulletin Board, "Miscellaneous" section, July 30, 2003
(http://www.jamesphogan.com/bb/content/073003.shtml)
Something I discovered in the process of growing up in London was that bombed
buildings make great playgrounds. All-round adventure parks without any
admission fee. Makeshift rafts transform flooded basements into eerie pirates'
caves. A surviving corner with some pieces of floor still attached becomes the
neighborhood North Wall of the Eiger. After raising three sons and three
daughters, I can testify that
young people are not designed to sit for hours in silent, obedient rows,
listening to droning adults. Their way of learning about the world is to
explore it. When I came to the States in the '70s, I was astounded to learn of
children commencing school at 7:00 a.m. and being passed like a production
line from class to class with only a half-hour break in the middle of the day.
It couldn't work.
And now, it seems, science has vindicated my suspicions. In an article
entitled "Hyperactivity 'just high spirits'"
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3102137.stm) the UK's BBC News reports that
Profesor
Priscilla Alderson, an expert in childhood studies at London's Institute of
Education, believes that such conditions as attention deficit disorder and
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