Modern Tales of a Mildly Electrifying Life in the Machine Age

I always knew I’d be a failure at something, but I didn’t know what it would be. So it was somewhat of a relief when my friend Carl informed me. He said, “You’re an example of the failure of telecommuting.”

This is what you get when you make the mistake of telling a software guy that you’re lonely.

Because I worked at home at a computer, I told him, I feel increasingly estranged from anything or anyone who doesn’t have option buttons.

“You need to join a bulletin board or something like CompuServe,” Carl suggested.

For what? I wondered. So I can spend more time communicating with a machine? No, what I need is human contact. I think I’m forgetting how to act around people. If it doesn’t have a mouse and modem, I don’t know what to say to it.

At parties, I’m like a kid in a candy store. It’s weird. They speak to you. They laugh. They put out carbon dioxide and take in oxygen. They don’t have an on-and-off switch.

Being alone all day with my machines I feel oddly like one of those wolf boys they find in the jungle. I don’t know how to actually talk anymore. If someone brings up a subject, I’ll say, “I wrote about that last year. See my disk labeled ‘November ‘86,” the file saved as ‘Phone Sex.’ ”

I communicate with my fingertips. H-e-l-l-o, m-y n-a-m-e i-s A-l-i-c-e. N-o-t A-l-y-c-e!

Instead of watching real clocks, I keep going to the Macintosh menu and clicking the alarm clock icon.

The high point of my day is checking the mailbox and the phone machine. The mail is like that old TV show “Strike It Rich.” Heartline! The sight of human handwriting practically brings tears to my eyes. A People magazine becomes a serious cultural voyage.

The biggest letdown of the day is when I check my phone machine and see those two zeros that spell: Nobody loves you. Nobody loves you.

When it’s rainy, I really start to go nuts. Electronic cabin fever. But if the weather’s nice, I’ll go out for a couple of hours just to see the numbers rise on the message counter. Once, I went away for the weekend just to see if I could break through to double digits. Bingo! I came home to 11 messages. But four of them were from the same person. One was from another machine. And two were wrong numbers. I actually returned a call to Picayune, Miss., just to talk to the lady.

Once, I tried to use my modem to access something other than newspapers. My husband had to send a document to a government agency in our state capital, and I wanted to show off what a tele-gonzo I was. But something went wrong and I couldn’t get the damn thing to work.

“Give it up,” my husband pleaded. But I sat there for an hour fiddling with the thing while he argued with me and called me humiliating names.

“I’ve almost got it this time,” I said to him. “You never have any faith in me. That’s why this relationship isn’t breaking through to new levels. . . .”

The next day, his colleague in Sacramento informed him that although we had failed to access his modem, we had somehow gotten into his phone machine. He had an hourlong recording of my husband and me bickering and calling each other obscene synonyms for obscure body parts. Everyone at the office got a big kick out of it.

A telecommunications humiliation. Was my disk red!