There is some crazy stuff going on out in the wide world. Mr. Putin’s troops appear to be maneuvering to take the eastern Ukraine, just as they did the Crimea. Chemical weapons have been used again in Syria, according to the regime in Damascus, by the good-guy-bad-guy rebels.
The big stand-off at the barren Bundy Ranch out in Nevada appears to have come to some sort of resolution for the moment, after the situation nearly came to something really ugly between hundreds of protesters and the Bureau of Land Management.
It is sort of an inverse version of the cities rebelling against the Government back in the 1960s. Weird. I have no idea what it means. Better said, I think I do know and wish I didn’t.
Thank God for the farm. No anxiety attacks down here. Just peace, tranquility and the new green grass coming up for the first cutting and some serious chores. It is a welcome change after the long winter, but I had a technical challenge to deal with first.
I sent my last Blackberry message with the opposable thumbs that Evolution gave us to master the globe and the spaces around it.
It was a sentimental chore. I recall so many of the old technical tectonic shifts that they blur together. I had an eight-track tape player, owned a Beta format video recorder, lived with rotary dialed phones, phonograph records, reel-to-reel and then cassette tape and the like.
Layers of cell phones, large-and-bulky to compact-and-flip to mini-tablet smart phones have come and gone without fanfare.
But 12 April, 2014 was something special for me in the avalanche of technology.
The company that uses me part time has taken away all the benefits. It doles out work by the hour now- sort of like cutting the company lawn when it is necessary. That is a dramatic change from being a salaryman, but is sufficient to my needs. One of the last perks is a company communications device, so they can summon me when needed, a slowly diminishing need. In my case, it was a Research in Motion (RIM) Blackberry.
Blackberry is a case study in species extinction. Founded in Canada in 1984 by an Ontario college kid named Mike Lazardis, RIM became a colossus in telecommunications technology. In 2010 the company had a 43% market share in US commercial and government hand-held devices. Last year? 3.8%.
That is about the equivalent of getting hit by a meteor. In the days after 9/11 I wound up working Public Health Emergency Preparedness through a surreal series of interactions with a man who preceded Kathleen Sebelius at HHS a few Secretaries back.
Our mission was to understand threat vectors: chem, bio and nuke. We had to ensure that the right prophylactics were acquired for the National Strategic Pharmaceutical Stockpile. There are actually regional stockpiles, administered by the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, and the charter is to have drugs on site where needed within eight hours of alert of need.
We had to communicate across a number of networks- and at one point I had a bandoleer of devices: a radio, pager, cell phone, guaranteed post-attack access phone, and the blackberry. It was too confusing to be manageable, of course, and the stuff that would still work when the cell networks went down from panicked overuse gradually fell by the wayside.
What was left when the dust settled (NOT the mysterious white powder in the envelopes that came in the snail-mail we were so worried about) were the personal cell and the Blackberry.
Getting down to two devices to lug around was a triumph. It was iconic at the time, part of the great change in American life. As early-adopters of the digital age, you might say we go back to the Wang Word Processors of the early ’80s. I always thought the devices were like the culinary machines that made purees and chopped vegetables, only in words. So my Navy colleagues and I have been digital denizens longer than most- almost 33 years.
But the phone thing. Lord, I remember the serious envy i had for my neighbor Marty who had one of the new mobile phones. He was quite proud of it, but bandwidth was a precious thing in- what was it? Late 80s or early 90s, and he was a little stiff about letting me borrow it to call home as we were mired in the Mixing Bowl of the Capital Beltway north of Springfield. It was a buck or something for a short call.
By the time the Islamists decided to up their game and start killing thousands of us, rather than just hundreds, we were in a wild west of devices and capabilities. The Blackberry was one of the answers. Email and text right to your device! Never unconnected! Work anywhere!
QWERTY keyboards, tiny things, with buttons to type- that is where the Blackberry name came from, the tiny keys looking like the rich dark nodes on a bit of fruit.
It was a heady time, and marked the rise of the ubiquitous mobile user, answering email while hurtling places in your automobile, making a cogent comment while walking blindly into traffic. The stuff that made the decade of the Oughts such an exciting experience.
Anyway, I was reading my company email on my Blackberry when I saw a terse announcement from the IT boffins. The told me they had noticed that I still had the original device they had issued me when I hired on almost seven years ago- a softly rounded little black phone with buttons I could bend to my will.
Like Microsoft, who just announced that they would no longer be supporting the XP operating system (still in use by 20% of Windows boxes, sorry, Chumps!), the company has decided that RIM will no longer be the standard for company communications.
Henceforth, we will migrate to the Apple OS, and accordingly, I was instructed to await a package from FedEx that would provide me a sleek Apple 5c phone to supplant the Blackberry connectivity.
The package arrived Friday, and I opened it with interest. Like all things Apple, the packaging was bright white plastic, modernistic and shrieking Steve Jobs-style elegant high-tech. The phone itself is a little slip of a thing with a brilliant display and no buttons. Touch screen, only. I looked blankly at my thumbs. What the hell am I supposed to do with them now, I wondered?
I glanced at the set-up instructions, and saw that step one was to shut down the Blackberry and render the phone inoperable. That was a big deal, cutting loose something that worked for something that didn’t, at least not yet.
I contemplated what needed to be done and picked up the RIM device and entered my password. The familiar icons appeared, and I navigated to the company email icon and pressed the center button to access it.
There was a note from some colleagues about something I had written last week, requesting clarification. My thumbs flew, and then I realized that once I sent the response, the next step would be to shut it down and pull the battery.
Fair enough. I thumbed in a note that this would be my last communication via Crackberry, and signed it. Then mashed the “send” command from the drop-down menu. After ensuring the message was actually in my out basket, I pressed the red phone button on the right side of the master menu, and watched the phone glow brightly. The poor thing told me I could press any key to abandon the shut down process.
It was a last plaintive plea for life.
Heartless, I let it die. Not my fault, I said to no one. Time marches on. Then I pulled out the Blackberry’s heart, reattached the battery cover and looked at the mute thing on the dining room table. Last Blackberry message, 11:23 AM, 12 April, 2014.
I looked at the white Apple 5c. I hate touchscreens. My thumbs are too big. Where is evolution, when you really need it?
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303