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Published on 03/03/1997 All articles from this issue

Hello central, give me people

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By Mary Cristy

A View from the Hills

Cris vows I'm an l8th century retread hopelessly at variance with a technological age. As voice mail, computers, pagers and answering machines conspire to impede rather than facilitate my progress, I'm inclined to agree.

I believe wholeheartedly that killers who run amok in shopping centers were once mild-mannered citizens who cracked listening to music they abhorred while they waited in vain for the sound of a human voice that might have saved them.

What should be a simple exchange of pleasantries or a straightforward business call is now a tangled web that enmeshes callers and leaves them dangling as helplessly as dinner for a hungry spider.

A call to our health care facility to renew a prescription kept me forcibly bound to the telephone for 45 minutes while traffic updates and news of the day poured into my captive ear, after which the announcer touted a product for which I have no use, and would be embarrassed to mention in mixed company.

The ultimate recording offered "in vitro fertilization" and suggested a consulting physician for an "in-depth evaluation of the problem."

"I'm practically a centenarian, you nitwit," I muttered to the machine.

En route to the coffee pot on his 10 o'clock break, Cris eyed me quizzically. I'd dropped my glasses, my vision was blurred, and I was pressing the pound key instead of the star.

"Don't press the buttons. If you just let the recording play out you'll get a live operator," Cris advised.

He discovered this one day when his computer crashed. A recording guided him through six procedures that proved ineffectual, at the end of which the recording instructed: "If this doesn't work, hang up!" The second time around Cris waited, allowed the "press this" litany to play out, and was rewarded with a live operator.

Calls to some editors and agents require a minimum of three exchanges and can go as high as six before the telephone-tag game ends.

Those who leap, dripping, out of bathtubs, sprint down the hall, or slide across the kitchen floor to reach a phone before the ringing stops are appalled at a laid-back attitude toward calls.

I prefer a minimalist approach. In my line of work a computer is a necessary evil, but don't expect to see me conversing while on my garden bench, in the street, or while driving. Cellular phones seem to me the ultimate in "big brotherhood," akin to the prying of an insensitive acquaintance with an ever-ready antenna to hone in on private, precious, contemplative moments.

Some are fated to go their antiquated way, impervious to pressures to bring them into the present century, living out their years as anachronisms, and well-content to remain microcosms in a world of macrocosms.

I reserve the right to opt for solitude and silence when "the world is too much with us." And if that makes me an l8th-century retread, it's too late to save me now.

Mary Cristy is a Los Altos Hills-based free-lance writer and longtime contributor to the Town Crier.