Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [59]
My high school class of rowdy hippies actually petitioned the school to turn the bells off. We found them insulting. After all, we had been sitting staring at the damned clock throughout each period of the day. On the hour, we were going to get up and shove off to the next class, bells or no bells. So let us have no bells. I understand as soon as we graduated and were out of the administration’s hair, they turned the damned things back on again and no one said boo.
I find myself wondering here if they still ring bells between classes at school. I have no idea. I could call some friends and ask, I suppose, but I don’t care enough, really, to pick up the phone.
The telephone has evolved from an incredibly useful daily aid to an invasive and challenging adversary, a potential monster, really, that we can and must control if we are to have any peace or get anything done. How it got this way, I’m not sure. Somehow, when no one was looking, someone passed a law, took advantage of a good thing, or simply let the wrong people take over, and boom, the sanctity of the inner sanctum was gone. The corporateers had found a way in, under the door, through cracks in the infrastructure, through the telephone.
Maybe this new adversary was born when telemarketers gained access to my home phone, or when junk mail began to outnumber the personal and necessary correspondence that arrives at my domicile every day. Or maybe it was when commercials on TV became more entertaining than the programming meant to deliver them, thus rendering the TV completely useless once and for all, that I suddenly looked at the phone on the wall, or the one in my pocket, and thought, wait a minute! This is just another goddamned idiot box! And since when does every idiot get to ring my bell? And where does it say I’m obligated to respond?
My parent’s generation believed that the phone was something precious, miraculous even, that should be used responsibly.
“People wouldn’t call unless it was important,” they would scold. Imagine. Now, people half my age and younger no longer even have a home phone. Why shoulder the expense? This group has no idea what it’s like for the phone to ring without knowing who, as we used to say, is on the other end of the line. Imagine the horror.
“It’s long distance!” children from my generation used to hear our parents exclaim. Long distance calls cost a lot of money. But back then, the caller was paying, not caller and callee. Sometimes it was difficult to get a connection. There was this great primitive hiss on the line that made the voices sound distant, so much so that people shouted to each other as if their voices could traverse a great abyss of space and time. Long after satellites and technology solved the audio and connection difficulties, those callers still kept screaming. Cell phones entered the scene with similar primitive glitches and idiosyncrasies. “Can you hear me now?”
In the Old Days, the average person had no idea how a voice could travel electronically. The operation of the telephone had some connection with the miracle of electricity: they both, the phone and electrical power, traveled through wires suspended on tree posts, wires that stretch from my house and around the whole world. That’s a lot of wires. And here, the capacity of human beings to accept an abstraction as reality intersects with their capacity for common sense. I don’t know how it works, but it does; therefore, other things/ideas that don’t work yet might someday. In this way the telephone is linked to an innate human survival instinct, the curiosity to see what opportunities lie in the next unknown moment. We are curious because we hunger, we fight to survive, we need to breed. This survival strategy also makes us socially addicted gossips and rumor-mongers. No one is exempt. The ancient grapevine has evolved from hushed whispers in corridors and across fences to the telegraph, the telelphone, and on to the Internet, and back to the phone again. The human grapevine remains fascinating in its power, which is growing exponentially.