Facing the Byte of a Liberated Age

The rain has stopped temporarily, the sky is gray and a southeasterly wind tosses the fronds of the neighbor’s palm trees across the street. Hatted and raincoated, I sit outside the front of my home, writing this column with pen on yellow foolscap. It’s an exasperating, yet oddly satisfying, way to to begin my day’s work in this whirlwind era of electronic communications.

I watch and wait, somewhat impatiently, for the tow truck dispatched by the Automobile Club of Southern California to move my old pickup truck just around the corner to Balboa Island’s only gas station for land-bound vehicles, where repairs will be made to get it started. A few hours ago our poorly drained street had enough water in it to float a very shallow draft skiff into the bay and around to Bisbee’s, the island’s only marine fuel dock.

Rod Smith, the mechanic, had come around the block and pronounced my truck’s ignition system water-sodden and dead. The rain did it in.

At last, the tow truck, operated by a product of our partially liberated age--an efficient, red-haired woman who tinkered expertly and proved to herself what we already knew. The truck wouldn’t start.

Partially liberated, indeed, are we all. A bit of freedom of choice to labor in a once all-male enclave has been achieved, while new chains are being heaped upon us by the computer. I take my case in point.

Without a home computer equipped with modem to transmit these words of mine by phone line into The Times’ computer system, I take up pen and paper.

If my truck is not repaired well before my paper’s deadline, a human courier must hand carry my written copy so it can be fed into The Times’ system via keyboard.

In defense of the computer, I hasten to point out that it can set type at lightning speed, once you get the words into its innards. It’s the getting in I’m concerned with now.

Mechanic Smith and I compared electronic woes.

“We can’t repair modern cars with computers in their engines until we buy a $14,000 scanner to locate the bugs. And then when we buy it, our customers will complain about the $30 charge for simply finding out what’s wrong with their cars.”

Yes, new electronic chains are being forged to keep the world wobbling along. I’m inside the house now finishing my written draft of this column. Smith has assured me he’ll have the old truck running by noon and I can drive up to Costa Mesa, serving as my own courier, and feed these words into the electronic maw myself.

Rain is falling again. It’s been a long time since I wrote anything for publication in longhand. In a way it’s refreshing to return to basics. I’d nearly forgotten I had to count the words to determine the proper length of column inches when set in type.

The computer does this for me in an eye’s blink when I press the right key. It also seeks out misspelled words in record time. No human brain must strain, except to make the words march correctly, no fuss and bother. The computer’s brain cells of programmed bits and bytes do all the busy work. A new human dependency has been created, new chains formed for writers and car mechanics, not to mention everybody else, from librarians to accountants, from bankers to architects. Hail, the computer age!

I put down my pen and listen to my watery world. Rain on the roof, the slap of boats’ halyards strummed by the wind against masts, gulls crying in the storm. I could write at home if a had a computer with modem, while listening to my world. When muscles and brain stiffen I could relax by walking around my island and observing its weathering moods.

Yes, soon I shall make that decision to buy my own home computer. I think now it’s not an all bad place in which to forge a new chain, connecting me to the system the easy way--chained at home, yet liberated.