We
are all in the same (electronic) boat
by
Robert LaFrance
Whew! I don’t think I have received
as many letters about a column as I did this week. They were almost all sent
through the actual mail; you know, where you put a stamp on an envelope and
send it to someone at a certain address. (Mine is 129 Manse Hill Road,
Kincardine, NB, E7H 3A3).
In my column I was talking about all
the automatic stuff we have to deal with every day – and every hour it seems.
The car door automatically locks when I start driving, the clock falls back an
hour without my telling it to, Microsoft Word corrects my spelling although I
can spell.
“My VCR keeps flashing
12:00-12:00-12:00,” wrote a young lady (64) from Johnville. “What the hell can
I do? My husband Harry is about as useless as wings on an elephant and he won’t
read the manual because he’s a man. Imagine!”
I advised her to take a piece of
duct tape and put over those flashing numbers and send Harry away. Jeez Louise,
is that rocket science?
George Noxman, a bachelor originally
from Knoxville, Tennessee, and now living in Knoxford, NB where he rents a
house from Edmund Knox, wrote about his cookstove. “I put on the timer to turn
on the oven while I’m away so my roast beast will be ready when I get home from
the office – I’m a civil servant – but it never works. I have done this nine
times now and the roast is just sitting there cold when I get home. In fact,
even the burners won’t work on this new stove, so I cook all my meals in the
microwave oven.” He probably also says pizza PIE.
I sent him back some suggestions:
“Dear Mr. Noxman: I think your clue is contained in your letter. You implied –
and I inferred – that you have been having this problem since buying a new
stove. Might I suggest that you check to see if the stove is plugged in. However, if it’s a gas stove,
use a flashlight rather than a lit match to look behind it.”
I received a return email that same
afternoon. Mr. Noxman, not mechanically inclined, had asked his neighbour, a
widow named Adelah Knokwurst, to look at the stove. It turned out to be a
dishwasher. She was so delighted with this helpless male that she proposed to
him immediately. “I wasn’t sure what she was proposing at first, and got my
face slapped,” he said, “but the date is set for January 7th.”
A former police officer also emailed
with a confidential question: “They give me this here gun, but whenever I shoot
at a suspect – somebody robbing a bank or cheating on his income tax for
example – he or she just stares at me and runs away. I got a little tired of
that, and so did the bank managers, so the next time I answered a call I used
my taser. For some reason it made a hole right in the middle of his chest.
What’s going on?”
As gently as I could, I suggested
that this officer should perhaps find another line of work, once he returned
from unpaid vacation in Renous. It was clear to me that he had gotten his taser
gun and his Uzi machine pistol mixed up, which was a lucky thing for the
previous bank robbers, but rather unfortunate for the guy with the hole(s) in
his chest. However, if you rob banks, you have to expect a bad day now and
then.
A final note on that letter: Since
X-rays, radar, etc. may make people temporarily sterile, I might suggest that
anybody who has been stopped by this guy for speeding along the highway – or
perhaps those first bank robbers I mentioned – shouldn’t despair at their not
fathering children for a while. I suspect that what he thought was a taser was
actually a radar gun.
This final comment for the day did
not come to me in a letter, but on the television news. As you know, I try and
dream up things that are ridiculous, but in this case real life was away beyond
anything I could dream up.
In the country called Azerbiajan, a
former enclave of the Soviet Union, elections are held once in a while. There
are electronic voting machines and all is automatic as you would expect of a
modern country like Azerbiajan, whose farmers are just finding out about
milking machines.
They had an election on October 9,
but three days before the election, the results were accidentally published
online. The government said they were just testing their equipment and these
were really the results of the 2008 election. This was a dubious claim, because
the names of the candidates were those in the 2013 election about to take
place.
You just can’t make up this stuff.
-end-
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