Taking Tech for Granted

A few weeks back, Mitch and I were talking, going over the details of this new website we wanted to launch. We were on a Zoom and the images and the voices were as clear as could be. Only thing was it was Friday for Mitch and it was Thursday for me, because Mitch was in Brisbane, Australia, and I was in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

That is, he was almost 10,000 miles away, in a different hemisphere, on a different day, and we were talking like there was no big deal about it.

Because, of course, there wasn’t. We may complain sometimes about the intricacies of tech, about how intractable it can be for those of us who didn’t grow up with it, how we miss the simplicity of transistor radios and the human fallibility of our old scratched-up LPs, but at the same time we pretty much take the extraordinary glories of tech for granted.

The phone is always within arms reach. We GPS going anywhere new. We google anything we can’t remember. We command Alexa to do the simplest of tasks, like turning on the news. We FaceTime with the distant grandkids and we run with podcasts in our ears and stream what we want to see when we want to see it.

And that all makes it difficult to remember a time when all that wasn’t the case.

Yet it’s true: we couldn’t always just hit send. I couldn’t in the late 1970s, when I was living in Paris. I was desperately trying to finish a manuscript that was way past its deadline. After I wrote “the end,” I raced with my box full of 300 typed pages, some marked with WhiteOut, to the local post office. It was a Saturday, and I got there right before the post office closed at noon.

I handed over my box, paid the tariff and walked home.

And as I walked, the thought occurred to me: Did I tell them to send it via airmail?

Because if I didn’t tell them, if they didn’t send it via airmail, the only copy of the manuscript would go by boat and take six or seven weeks to get to my publisher.

And I would be screwed.

My wife and I spent the rest of the weekend worrying. On Monday morning, right at 8 a.m., I showed up at the post office to ask the agent to check the records and see if my package had gone via airmail.

It had.

We celebrated that night—not the good news, really, but the absence of bad news, the sense of getting very close to the edge of the cliff and not falling off. There’s probably a German word for that. I’m sure there’s no tech term for it.