This morning at the men’s breakfast at our church, the conversation at one point turned to computer troubles. My friend Charles Lee had been dealing with a troublesome laptop computer, and he ended up consulting with tech service people in India in the effort to track down the problem. The search turned out successfully, although the language interchanges proved problematic and fascinating.
Like myself, Charles was born and raised in the era of the Ozark language in northwest Arkansas. When a conversation pairs Ozark dialect English with English spoken with the inflections of a native of India, you have a fascinating communications challenge. But, Pea Ridgers have always risen to the challenges of their times, and Charles and his consultants in India got the job done.
I am right fascinated with how computers, which were high-dollar luxuries until a few yesterdays ago, have become today’s necessities, almost.
I say almost, because there are definitely still a few determined hold-outs, folks dedicated to living their lives without computers.
But, even for those who are determined to remain computerless, they are dealing with a computer when they go through the grocery checkout, or make a phone call, or get a bank statement, or fill the car’s gas tank. I am sitting here writing with a computer, and many of us have become accustomed to using them for communicating, keeping records, looking at and sharing family pictures, and searching out information such as we used to look up in an encyclopedia.
I like to read the Rose is Rose cartoon in the comics section of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. For the last several days, Rose has been in crisis. She and Jimbo have had to put their computer in the repair shop. She is almost lost without her computer. In today’s cartoon, she is telling herself that the repair geeks will soon solve the problem, and at worst, it will only be a few weeks.
The strip ends, with a startled look showing on Jimbo’s face, as he realizes that this crisis is not just a few hours, or days, but weeks of deprivation.
It impresses me to go into a store or an office on business, only to discover that the computer is down,so they can’t sell you anything, can’t accept a payment and can’t answer any questions. That didn’t happen in the old days, when invoicing meant writing down the purchase on a slip of paper, and tallying the total sale with a pencil, or when records were stored in books and file folders and on large sheets of paper called spreadsheets.
Charles Crabtree reminded me today of the early 1950s when some of us kids were allowed to leave school to go to the Crabtree home to watch baseball’s World Series on TV. The Crabtrees may have been the first family in Pea Ridge to have a television. The picture was fuzzy and snowy, but at that time it was just about the finest luxury we could imagine.
It was 1953 before my family began thinking,“You know, we just might get us one of those TV things, too.” The first families to get a TV had lots of visitors, people curious to see what this amazing new thing could do. But within a couple of years, televisions became widespread.
These days, it is not amazing to own a TV, it is more amazing to find someone who doesn’t. Many families have three or four. In my work, I have often visited homes where the people couldn’t afford food, or beds or chairs; yet almost always they would at least have a TV, and maybe a VCR for playing movie tapes. Apparently the TV entertainment was more important than bread orbeans or potatoes.
Fifty years ago a cell phone would have been almost inconceivable, and human beings had lived well for thousands of years without them. Even aslate as 2000, I remember thinking I would never need one of those things.
I was often just glad to get away from the phones to relax. Now I think it would be a challenge to try to convince people that a cell phone is a luxury, and that you really don’t need one that much. We used to go where a person was in order to talk to them face to face. Now we have to talk while we go, and we can’t wait to get that urgent text message or to answer back. People are dying to keep in communication; but they may be losing the art of really talking to each other.
◊◊◊
Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history.
He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Community, Pages 5 on 04/20/2011