by
Robert LaFrance
This morning as I was sipping a
double latte (whatever that is) on the porch, my dog Kezman asked me what is
the main difference between now and when I was a kid. “Well, old faithful dog,”
I said, “the main difference between 2013 and 1980 – we’ll say – is in the area
of communication.”
“You’re talking about email, text messaging, and
stuff like that, aren’t you?” he said, between bites of Gaines Gravy Train.
(Really No-Name dogfood I had bought at the discount store, but I told him it was Gravy Train.)
“No, I’m talking about people actually talking to
each other,” I explained, “and please don’t drool on your blanket. Today people
communicate in 5-second sound bites, or if they’re really eager for a chat, in
15-second sound bites.” To prove my point, I walked away.
**************
This is 2013 all right. Listen to this radio news
item. I did use the word ‘news’?
“A study done at fast food restaurants in Canada and
the U.S. has reported that drive-thru window times have increased over the past
year,” the announcer droned. “The average time that McDonalds’ drive-thru
customers spend, well, driving through, has increased by ten seconds from last
year.”
I tried to get my head around the fact that someone
had actually used up money to hire people who would spend their days timing
people at drive-thrus. This is important I suppose. Anyway, the final finish –
as my wife’s Aunt Ruby Phillips used to say – is that these hirelings
ascertained that the average time a car spends in a McDonalds drive-thru is
three minutes and nine seconds, whereas last year it was two minutes 59
seconds. Is there anyone in North America to whom this makes a difference?
************************
Amazingly, I am still on the same
subject – food – and I can’t take long writing about this because I’m going
with Flug to bail his nephew Gerund out of jail. Gerund passed a 10-dollar
counterfeit bill at a restaurant over in Caribou, Maine, and the owner was not
impressed. Neither were the Caribou police, the State police, or the Secret Service,
that branch of the Treasury Department that not only protects the president but
deals with those who deal with counterfeit money. From the phone conversation I
overheard between Flug and Gerund, it seems that the latter has already hired a
lawyer who will fight the case on the legal basis of ‘quid pro quo’. “Whatever
you do to me I can do back to you.”
Gerund said on the phone: “I asked for a coffee and
he gave me a mixture of chicory and instant decaffeinated coffee; they put a
non-dairy creamer in front of me, and when I wanted to sweeten the mess, the
waiter gave me some sort of aspartame-filled artificial sweetener. If they can
serve counterfeit coffee, cream and sugar, why can’t I give them a counterfeit
bill?”
****************************
Canadian teenage boys have received
a lot of criticism over the years for wearing their baseball caps backward.
Just about every comedian has some kind of a routine where he or she makes a
joke about that. “What are they trying to do, keep their neck from getting
sunburned? Ha-ha-ha!!!”
Today, the laughter stopped, because
I found out there’s a valid scientific reason for wearing one’s baseball cap
with the visor down one’s neck. Wind. I’m not referring to the aftermath of a
large bean and salad supper, but to the air currents blowing across the parking
lot where I was walking and wearing my cap with the letters ‘Victoria Star’. My
cap is probably in the St. Lawrence River by this time. It occurred to me as I
watched it fly away like a paycheque that, had I been wearing it backward, that
never would have happened. I hereby apologize to all male teenagers for any
time I ever thought you were crazy for wearing your cap backward.
Early in this column I mentioned how
people now talk in sound bites. This is not to be confused with the bytes on a
computer, although that instrument – a blessing and a curse – has contributed
to the changes in communication. I started on that trail exactly 19 years ago
this month when I was talking to the late Bob Inman and asking him to advise me
on buying a new computer. We went to the nerd store and he picked out
everything I would need. When we had finished bringing all those boxes in my
house here, he started to go and said: “Okay, it’s just a matter of putting it
all together and you’re on your way.”
I pulled a gun. “Bob,” I said, “sit
down and get ready to stay a while.” It took the two of us (and the Luger) an
hour and a half to set up my new computer that cost $4300 and had an operating system called
Windows 3.1. Each time he made a move, I
recorded it, and even then it was weeks before I had things under control. It actually worked, no viruses, no spam. I
don’t want to talk about how things have gone skittering away since then. I’ve
already exceeded my sound bite quota.
-end-
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