Communications Breakdown
So here we go again…funny what cranks my brain into gear.Missed a day at work yesterday as I writhed in pain in the throes of passing a kidney stone that still hasn’t passed. Word is that it might have gone back up somewhere to hide for a while. Some men and a few women will tell you that this is the closest thing for a man to experience to that of childbirth. Fricking painful it is….Can’t wait for this little puppy to return!
So I was sitting the other day in a restaurant – not an expensive one – and two men sitting next to me, against the window to the outside world were chatting. Now step back a bit and let me preface this story by telling you that I live in a Blackberry world. I work in the most populous city in Canada and in the downtown core it appears that easily half of the people are hooked up to one of these devices. The cool ones have an iPhone, but it’s likely their own personal phone because companies in this country have already spent so damned much money to RIM to set up and operate a BB environment they wouldn’t dare think about crossing that line in their corporate spending budgets! So there they were, two grown men, obviously emerging for the first time this fine day from the underground (we have an expansive underground shopping world that links most of the downtown core’s building to one another). The first gentleman is staring intently at his BB ignoring the other, when the second gentleman says “I wonder what the weather is like today”….The first thinks for a second, moves his thumb to and fro and announces “It’s light snow and -6”, he second pulls his Blackberry out and about two minutes later announces to his buddy “Really? Mine says -5 and moderate snow”.
I laughed so hard that the milk I wasn’t drinking actually spewed out my nose!
Why did I laugh, because I looked out the window and saw that it wasn’t snowing at all (never did that day in fact) and it was actually -10.
The point? Well it’s fairly sad to me (and I am one of the sad ones) as to how connected we have become and how connected we feel we have to be. As we walk through an underground system staring at our palms the emails, the web, the phones, the whatever-you-want-them-to-be’s keep us as close as we want to be to wherever/whoever we want to be. I love nothing more than spending time with my family, but I can admit that the amount of time that my family spends disconnected is limited. I know that I am the absolute worst in the family and that the kids are the absolute best (my wife is really pretty and great so we’ll tell her she’s a close fourth on this one). So I sit there with the kids, who are as excited as a castrated newt to sit with me, and within seven seconds they have broken into a game of mini-sticks or mini-hoops or Wii or whatever and what am I to do? Okay the bathroom needs renovating, but come on, not today! Anyways, enough about me, back to dolt and moron in the restaurant. What has this world come to that two grown men who want to know the weather need to consult their mobile computers to get the weather, and not just look out the window? I’m going to put down my BB now and talk to people…..the only problem is the people I need to talk to are all stored in my BB and I don’t know their numbers or where they live!
posted by G.M. Shier @ Wednesday, January 28, 2009
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