Welcome to the Texting World

“Give me your cell number so I can text you the information,” the coach said over the (home land line) telephone last week.

“We don’t have texting,” I replied.

He laughed at me. “Well, texting is how we get information to the parents during our away tournaments,” he explained, “so it really is necessary.”

The next day I was on the phone with my cell phone company adding texting to our family plan.

My husband and I have resisted this for several years now, seeing no “up” side to the ability to text information to people, when email and phone calls can do the same job. Everywhere I look I see people looking down at their phones, their thumbs going crazy. Up to this point, I have been happy to be relatively immune to the outside world when I am out with my children. The cell phone only rings if one of my children needs to get in touch with me. I can enjoy the here and now.

I started to have second thoughts while at Pony Nationals in North Carolina two weeks ago. I was at a park in the middle of nowhere at 7 a.m., my 12- and 5- year olds in tow. I was carting a medium-sized cooler full of ice and water bottles. I was on foot when I realized I was at the wrong field, and there were six other fields in the park. Then I was told there were copperhead snakes in the woods.

I called one of the other mothers on the team, who picked us up, brought us back to our car, and had us follow her to the correct field. When I got there, the other parents said that the manager had texted them the correct field number.

So I thought maybe, just maybe, I would add it on to my plan before the next school year started. My older daughter has been missing team texts for cross country, and my son’s baseball team now uses texting as its primary form of communication. I also get bad reception on the phone and can hardly hear the person on the other end.

I tried to send my husband my first text. “I” I wrote and hit send by accident.

He called me back. “Did you try to call me?” he asked.

“No. I tried to write I love you.”

“Why don’t you just call me?” he stated, annoyed.

“I’m sure the office will appreciate you have texting now,” I offered.

“The beeper works fine,” he insisted.

Friday found us on the way to Massachusetts for the tournament with this new team. My 12- and 14- year olds were pretty quiet in the back seat, giggling once in a while about something someone had texted them. They were communicating with every girl they knew who had a cell phone, even the ones they don’t usually talk to.

We got to their cousins’ house and found there was no cell phone reception in the house. I was slightly relieved. Until that evening when I was still waiting for a text from the coach about what time to meet for breakfast. I had to go out in the middle of the street, being eaten by bugs, to find a signal.

They locked up the house, not knowing I was out there. I rang the doorbell. My brother-in-law opened the door, surprised. “I was trying to get a text,” I answered, embarrassed.

“Welcome to the texting world,” my friend texted me.

“Thanks,” I replied.

“Yeah,” she wrote.

Where’s the water? It’s in the fax machine.

Gondolas in Venice

“We’re going to vote,” I told my three-year-old as we walked out the door.

We drove the mile to the nearest school and parked.

“Where’s the water?” she asked me.

“I don’t have any water,” I said.

“But where’s the water? There’s no boat.”

“No, not boat. VOTE. You’ll see.”

We went in and voted.

Next stop was Staples, a long overdue trip.

Last summer, while dusting some shelves, I knocked a small water globe onto our fax machine. This is one of the necessary pieces of office equipment for my husband’s process serving business.

While the perfumy smell of the water fill the room, I tried to rescue the machine from the ravages of the water and broken glass.

It was still able to send, but not receive or copy.

Due to a combination of my dislike of shopping and not wanting to spend the money on a new machine, we have gone for months receiving PDF files from clients via email in lieu of faxes. The problem with this is that my husband does not know how to use the computer. So every time he needs to retrieve a file, I need to be home, download the file, and print it out. Sometimes clients use a program that is incompatible with my computer, causing more frustration.

We also have a weird combination of programs that work on one computer and not another, and printer problems, which result in my having to email files from one computer to another in order to print out a simple document.

The other problem with faxing, which was present before the actual machine broke, was that I had to be home in order to manually switch the line to receive a fax.

All my problems related to faxing were solved today!

I found a display unit on clearance, as well as a machine that automatically switches to receive a fax, without requiring a second line.

Ah, freedom! Freedom from having to retrieve documents online, freedom from having to pick up business calls during the day, freedom from picking up the phone to hear the annoying BEEP BEEP BEEP of a fax machine.

It is so amazing what a simple piece of technology can do to change your life.

Disconnected

On Friday evenings we go to the library for our summer reading club prizes. This week my three-year-old won a little pink pail and shovel. “Just what we needed to go to the beach!” I told the librarian. My poor kids have been taking empty chlorine buckets to the beach because none of the stores I frequent carry pails and shovels.

She lifted up her pail and shovel and asked, “We go to the beach now?”

“Not now, honey,” I answered, wishing that I had time to take them that weekend. The salty air would help with clearing up my allergic cough.

She carried that pail and shovel around the house and yard with her all weekend, repeatedly asking until bedtime, “We go to the beach now?”

So finally Monday morning comes around with promising weather and nothing on our schedule. We go to Cedar Beach in Mount Sinai, carrying nothing but a jug of water, lunch bag, and towels.

I’d spent the morning answering emails and telephone calls and, with my cell phone turned off, I felt free of electronic communications as soon as I left the house.

My husband has been joking that I am going to be sucked into “The Matrix” because I have been spending so much time on the computer. Now that I have my laptop with wireless internet, I can keep it on all the time and go back and forth between that and household business whenever we are in the house.

I carried it upstairs to my desktop computer one night so I could copy my favorite websites from one to the other. I started to get confused working with two computers at once, typing on one keyboard and wondering why it wasn’t showing up on the right screen. That’s when Kevin came up the stairs and made his Matrix joke.

My husband hates computers, the internet, and cell phones. Never mind that he now needs the computer to run his business; he has me to take care of that end. I also forced him to get a cell phone after he got a flat tire in Deer Park at 9:00 one night and had to walk three miles to find a working pay phone.

Our “best man”, Ted, who works in management for the software business, is up on all the latest technology. He laughs at Kevin’s beeper. “You have to make the technology work for you,” he says, as he lays his Blackberry on our kitchen table. A call comes in; he looks at the caller id and ignores it. “See?” Then he explains why “peoplepc” is not an acceptable email suffix for professionals and convinces me to switch over to Gmail.

Really I am an outdoor girl at heart. The computer is just a tool for my writing. I wish I could sit up in a maple tree, as I used to do when I was little, pen some stories into a notebook, and send them anonymously to a publisher, like Louisa May Alcott. Things don’t work like that anymore.

I used to think that it would be great to have a laptop and sit at the beach and write. But once I get there, I am happy not to have it with me. We sit on the white, rocky sand and stare into the face of a white pigeon. The sky is a light blue with puffy little white clouds here and there. Little boats sit beyond the buoys and I wonder who is on them. The older three kids plunge into the water and my three-year-old, shovel and pail in one hand, holds her other hand out to me. We go down to the water. She dares herself to go up to her neck and a speeding boat sends a wave that spills into her mouth.

“Are you okay?”

She laughs in response.

And I realize I haven’t coughed once since we got there.

“Be still and know that I am God!” Psalm 46:10

Moses before the Burning Bush
Domenico Feti, 1613-14
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Of Children and Peasants

Excerpt from “Anna Karenina Comes to America” by Leia Tolstaya*, Millerskaya Ltd., New York, 2009

Levina stared out the kitchen window as her children played in the lightly falling snow. She’d been trying to work out a new system whereby the children would get their chores done quickly and efficiently, at the same time seeing that such a system was for their own betterment.

Her new Kitchenaid whirred, stirring a batch of chocolate chip cookie dough. Levina sighed. She’d been told to invest in new and better technologies to improve the production of her household. But leave this new appliance in the hands of her children and they’d throw rocks in it, then say, “Oh well, you should’ve let us do it the way we’re used to.”

Little Katrina came in, looking at the blue monster in disgust. “Ugggh,” she grunted, “the Kitchenaid is taking over our job. We could’ve mixed that for you.” They reluctantly admitted the appliance was more efficient at mixing, and even did a better job, but would rather do it the old-fashioned way. Levina couldn’t understand why they didn’t appreciate all she had given them, in the hopes of making their own little lives easier, as well as her own.

To be continued…

*Leia Tolstaya is a pen name for Elizabeth K. Miller, and as such her works fall under the same copyright.

Communications and a Visit to Highbury

“A Visit to Highbury: Another View of Emma”, is an entertaining and well-written novel by Joan Austen-Leigh, the great-grand-daughter of Jane Austen’s nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh. It takes the form of an exchange of letters between two sisters.

Mrs. Mary Goddard, the mistress of the girls’ school in Highbury, shares the local gossip about the beloved characters created by Jane Austen in “Emma”: Emma Woodhouse, Harriet Smith, Jane Fairfax, Robert Martin, Mr. Elton, Frank Churchill, and Mr. Knightly, among others. Mrs. Charlotte Pinkney, from her dark and gloomy house in London, speculates on the causes of their behavior and complains about her loneliness in her new marriage.

Although separated by a mere twelve miles, without a private carriage and the means to travel it is like an ocean between them. The last time they saw each other was seventeen years ago, when Charlotte went to help Mary grieve the loss of her children to scarlet fever. Writing almost every day in copious detail, they maintain their closeness and help to lend support and advice where needed. The title comes from the hopes Charlotte has of obtaining permission from her new husband to visit Mary.

Reading the letters made me think of the change communications has brought to us. Although my sister lives several hundred miles away in Tennessee, we are able to talk via telephone and e-mail. A car ride is only one full day away, and a plane ride about four hours.

The written letter has become quite rare and old-fashioned, something I now share only with older relatives who do not access e-mail. How much deeper the letters in this book go than the typical telephone conversation or e-mail! There may be a frequency and ease of contact, yet the depth is something that is often lost in the technology.

On the other hand, with much thoughtfulness we can use our modern gadgets to enhance our long-distance relationships. My grandmother, mother, sister, and I exchange e-mails several times per week. Several years ago my husband bought me a digital camera. I liberally send the photos to share my excitement in a memory made that day.

And my digital camcorder, another Christmas gift a few years later, I use to take home movies of every-day activities that my relatives must miss out on. Last Christmas I made copies of the movies and sent them as Christmas gifts to those who would most appreciate them. This year I will do the same, so they can share in Baby’s First Birthday, Baby’s First Steps, baseball games, and track meets.

Technological communications can distance us or make us closer. It is all in how we make use of it!

Additional Post-Notes:

I will try to get my hands on the sequel, “Later Days at Highbury”, and review it here.

My review should appear on ReviewScout.com in five to seven days.

Read my post on Austen’s Times.

Read my post on Northanger Abbey.