Marriage of Inconvenience, Technically Speaking

I’m always reading about the things that strain marriages: Money. Sex. Ray Conniff Christmas albums. The cost of a restaurant meal in Moorpark.

At this particular moment, however, none of the above applies to my personal state of wedded bliss. No sirree. Currently, my husband and I are not speaking to each other over technology.

He’s for it, of course--all the gizmos. I am married, God help me, to a Y2K compatible man.

I myself am Y2K combative. Each time I pull out of the driveway to head off for a no-big-deal trip to Vons in my sport utility vehicle, my husband is standing there, poised, waiting to thrust the cell phone through the car window.

“You never know!” he sings brightly, backpedaling in the driveway while wagging the phone at me through the window, as I attempt to back out, phone free.

It’s a little like the Peter Principle. Because the technology exists, someone will surely have a desperate need to speak to me via telephone in the milk and produce aisles between 4:06 and 4:09 p.m.

“I don’t want to know!” I mouth through my electronically closed window. You have to start the motor to roll the car’s windows up. This is known as technological advancement.

When I am driving a car--no mean feat for an absent-minded, middle-aged, nearsighted woman listening to Nina Totenberg on public radio and trying to see over the steering wheel at the same time--I don’t want the telephone to ring. And if society knows what’s good for it, it doesn’t want my telephone to ring, either. Not if I’m doing more than 12 mph.

And I certainly don’t want to be fishing around for a ringing telephone among the overdue library books, used Starbucks cups and grocery receipts on the passenger seat while doing 64 mph on the southbound onramp.

Even worse, though, would be attempting to dial a number. “Don’t Drive and Dial” should be Gov. Gray Davis’ new motto for California. Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley could lose their safe-city designations over driving and dialing.

Until I stopped smoking, I drove and smoked at the same time. Nothing was more distracting than accidentally dropping a hot ash between my legs while changing lanes on the 101 on a Friday afternoon.

What followed wasn’t road rage, because the term hadn’t been invented in 1993. But it must have looked like it to other drivers. I’m lucky they didn’t do road rage back at me.

That’s what I’m afraid will happen if I try to drive and dial at the same time today, which you have to do either one-handed, or by steering with your elbows while you hold the phone.

What I’m sure I’d do is drop the phone between my legs just after pushing the “send” button. It would bounce onto the floor under the brake pedal of course, just out of reach, while someone on the other end weakly answered, “Hello? . . . Hello? . . . “

Meantime, I’m racking up expensive cell phone minutes as I whiz past the Wagon Wheel offramp at 69 mph because the cell phone that landed under the brake pedal won’t allow me to slow down.

Of course, our technological marital differences don’t stop with cell phones.

I’m still ambivalent about the first technological advance we allowed into our home--the answering machine. My husband, though, wants us to join the ‘90s and get call waiting, caller ID and also that little thingy where you can call home or work from your car and listen to all the hang-ups your answering machine has picked up for you in the last two hours.

Of the three, call waiting hurts my feelings the most. That’s the one where you’re having a nice conversation with someone who suddenly puts you on hold because someone better just came on the line.

Call waiting is definitely the cause of my low self-esteem.

And you can look this up--technology reached its zenith with the invention of the leaf blower. Technology should have hung up its spurs right there.

But no.

It gave us the World Wide Web.

It is beyond me how anyone can prefer to sit in an office chair and look up something on the Web when they can go to the public library and check out a book and find out half as much in twice the time.

Nor is it too strong a verb when I say I abhor e-mail. The only e-mail I want is envelope mail, delivered by a friendly postal worker in blue shorts.

Anyone who actually reads those little italicized “you can reach . . . at .com” blurbs at the end of columns will never see one with my name on it. My e-mail address is 93 S. Chestnut St., Ventura 93001. Requires a 33-cent stamp. Write when you get work.

My Flat Earth Society membership card, which was typed on a Smith Corona manual typewriter with a ribbon and a carbon, might be a hint about my attitude toward faxes.

Need I say that my husband is thinking about adding another phone line at home so we can be fax-compatible 24 hours a day without tying up our other phone line?

Looking toward the new millennium, nothing defines it better for me than what happened last night: I came home, kicked off my shoes, put on my robe, took my 20 mg. of Prozac, then sat down and dialed an old friend on the phone, only to hear that shrill, whistling sound, something like a smoke alarm with a bad battery, which told me my old friend was expecting a fax.