She’s Living in a TechnoWorld
Up in his loft--it’s a nerd! It’s a dude! No! It’s TechnoGuy!
TechnoGuy lives and works in his technopad surrounded by big black machines. He thinks nothing of it.
“Awesome,” I say when I walk in.
“Alice, it’s just a big stereo,” he says of the 10, 8-foot-high black boxes with maybe 30 control panels that make me feel like Alice when she was just small.
There are only three items in the pad I can identify. There’s a tea kettle next to some kind of state-of-the-art coffee bean splicer. There’s a couch where TechnoGuy parks it when he logs off his computer. And I recognize the comforting, almost homey gray box of TechnoGuy’s Macintosh computer. It’s a clone of the Mac I have back in my low-tech home. But, of course, he’s got some kind of fancy computer mouse that’s like a genetically altered animal compared to my old house mouse.
He pops some coffee into the microwave. (Ever notice how no one ever puts anything in a microwave? They “pop” it in furtively, with full fear of frying.)
I decide to gross out TechnoGuy. “I don’t own a microwave,” I say in the rebellious tone of a technophobe.
No microwave!
And I don’t have a stereo.
No stereo!
And I don’t have a dishwasher.
No dishwasher!
So, what’s a nice, red-blooded, machine-fearing girl like me doing in a place like this? How is it that I find myself on the cutting edge in a strange man’s apartment? Why am I in TechnoGuy’s world?
I am here because he has gallantly offered me the use of his laser printer. Like some latter-day Walter Raleigh, TechnoGuy’s gesture is his way of throwing his cloak over a black puddle.
Until he buzzed me in past his security system, I have only known TechnoGuy in the virtual sense. Virtual reality is what computer people call the world in the box of chips. TechnoGuy is my pal from The WELL, the computer network favored by people who like to transmit for the hell of it.
All I knew of him before I entered his technopad were words on a computer screen from his modem to mine.
I had asked people on The WELL (acronym for Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) if anyone could recommend a good place to take a disk for quality printing. One WELLbeing (as gentle users are known) pointed out that if I take my disk to a commercial printing place, I’d better get it disinfected for viruses. In the virtual world, you can get a disease from casual contact. Old-fashioned girls never think of these things.
TechnoGuy takes my disk. I am a stranger in his electronic paradise. Before I leave the technopad, he “treats” my disk with his viral detection software.
Now, I’m a suspicious modern city gal. If there is one thing I don’t trust, it’s machines. If there’s another thing I don’t trust, it’s strangers. But even as I remain suspicious of the weird golems in TechnoGuy’s world, I trust the medium by which I have come to know him--words. You know, when you finally pay some attention to that man behind the curtain, you find that even the Wizard of Oz is just a friendly guy with a lot of gadgets.
He ain’t heavy. He’s my virtual brother.
