Vancouver Province
for June 16, 2000

You can’t turn back the hands of time. We must, alas, live with the benefits of the computer age whether we want to or not. And we betray our age when we reminisce for what is gone forever.

Most of what we remember as being so good wasn’t. You hoped against hope that you didn’t buy a Friday or Monday car – the Friday one being build by workers who had their minds of weekend pleasures and the Monday ones by those who hadn’t yet got over them. New cars often broke down, had limited if any warranties, and the phrase used car salesman made Jack the Ripper look like a choir boy by comparison.

Sex was no hell either. This was all before the pill and a hell of a lot of chasing of an otherwise willing mate led to a lot of struggling in the back seat with little to show for it.

There are lots of good things these days. I am doing this on a computer that saves things, moves stuff around where I finally want it to be and makes editing a cinch. I can send stuff I write to editors and we can do out editing back and forth without needed in talk to each other. I can correspond with my pal Norm in New Zealand or my grandson at University in London, Ontario virtually for nothing and it’s immediate. Talk with them too for a few bucks extra.

But I despair the loss of two things, the first being the "number please" girl on the telephone and the real person at the other end. You see, children, there was a time when there was no dial on your telephone and you just picked up the receiver and a lady – it was always a lady – said "number please" whereupon you said Kerrisdale 2780 and in a trice you were talking to your Mom and explaining how the movie was longer than you expected and you would catch the next #8 streetcar home right away. (If the number had a letter – like my cousin’s – such as Kerrisdale 2389R, that was a terrible social stigma because it showed that you shared a phone with a couple of other people. That was called having a "party" line.) But "central" as we called the ‘number please" lady was very accommodating. There was no need to fumble with 17 digit out of town numbers – Hell, out of town in those days was Langley not London. And she was very helpful. But the big advantage was that when you got a busy signal that was the end of the matter. You didn’t have to select options by pressing your dial – there were no options and there was no dial. It’s true that you couldn’t leave messages but that meant no "telephone tag" either - and any way, how many times would you love to be able to say "sorry, I tried to call you but there was no answer" and have that end the matter. In those days, when you called a place of business you got a real people. No recordings … no options … no drifting further and further into the communications la-la land large corporations have designed so that only the most sophisticated hackers can penetrate the system.

The other thing I miss is the paper boy –yes, dear friends papers used to be delivered by kids on bikes who, while they occasionally left your paper in the eaves could usually be relied upon to hit your front porch from 100 paces while riding, heavy bag full of papers on the shoulder, with no hands on the handlebars. You got to know his kid – and his Mom who delivered when the kid was sick which was invariably during the only snowfall of the year. And the paper was always on time – you could set your watch by the thump of the verandah. Now the paper comes some time, by car and in the hot tub.

You got to know this kid just like you got to know the milkman, the bread man, the egg man and Low Yo the vegetable truck man. Ye gods, I’d forgotten about them! Come to think on it – given a few little things like stereos, car warranties and, above all else "the pill" there’s something to be said for the days when part of your personal community was a real person.