My inner life had taken an noticeable downturn ever since I got a new iPhone last week. Those of you reading this account far enough in the future will, I suspect, think this reference to such old-school tech is at best quaint, the same way those of my time would if they heard a story involving a rotary telephone or a typewriter.
Believe it or not, in my probable present, iPhone 6’s and similar tech are still a big deal. People value such things, desire them, obsess over them.
Multi-megapixel photos and videos, constantly connected location-aware messaging, documents, social apps, mapping, all the new bells and whistles, including ringtones of bells and whistles and sounds that leave bells and whistles in the dust, are all the rage now. They have been for some time.
You can’t go anywhere in the so-called modern without seeing a majority of those around you peering down into cell phones and tablets and watches and other devices, white wires leading to buds in their ears, seemingly unaware of others and the world and circumstances around them. Lost as if inside a dream inside a dream.
When I last visited, my younger grandniece had just purchased a “selfie stick.” I myself barely knew what a selfie was, much less understood the need for an extendable stick to attach a cellphone to that makes taking selfie photos easier. Look Ma, no hands!
As I say, I myself was clueless. My grandnieces can attest to that, mainly based on my recognition abilities for current music.
Since purchasing my new phone (because the Home button on my earlier model one had become intermittently troublesome), various things have started to unravel.
I had unexpectedly been forced to contact a variety of bureaucracies, and dealing with them took hours of repeating the same basic information over and over and over, because the scripts the telesupport personnel worked from demanded only certain answers in a specific, slow-paced order.
There was no hurrying such things. Asking to speak to a supervisor no longer worked. All it did was send me back to the bottom of the queue, to wait through more horrific muzak and advertisements for unwanted products and suggestions to visit websites I had already spent far too much of my time exhausting possibilities on.
And when I was reconnected, I was once again forced to answer the same, bloody questions even though the previous telesupport workers had given me case numbers and supposedly had already taken copious notes.
I have long since learned not to let my unfortunate tendency to get very easily irritated and angry get the better of me. There was a time in my younger days when my friends had nicknamed me hammer, telling me I was a one-tool sort of guy who looked at every problem as if it were a nail to be pounded. Over the years, I’ve discovered a few more tools in my kit that I’m able to use in a pinch, even with those who spoke a hard-for-me-to-understand variety of Indian chinglish.
I realize it could very well be that it is me, with my toneless midwestern American sensibilities and non-current musical tastes and regrettable deep technical understand of what my technical issue is, who in the bottleneck in the whole contact-us-for help system.
As I waited on speakerphone, I read an excerpt from Douglas Harding’s great book, On Having No Head: Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious. If you haven’t read it yet, you should. It’s that good.
“It took me no time at all to notice that this nothing, this hole where a head should have been, was no ordinary vacancy, no mere nothing. On the contrary, it was very much occupied. It was a vast emptiness vastly filled, a nothing that found room for everything—room for grass, trees, shadowy distant hills, and far above them snow-peaks like a row of angular clouds riding the blue sky. I had lost a head and gained a world.”
“Yes, suh. My name is Pateesh. I understand you would like to purchase some software?”
“No,” I said, taking a deep breath and trying to hold back the trigger on my hammer. “I already bought the software earlier today. What I need is a version of the software I bought that I can use it on my Macintosh computer. I can’t use an EXE file. I need an ISO file.”
“ISO file?” Pateesh asked. “What means ISO, suh?”
Breathe, I told myself. Think about that vast emptiness vastly filled.
Thank you for reminding me of Douglas Harding and his lack of head. Sometimes getting no head is better. Plus, non sequitur, “timeless Midwestern American sensibilities” is a genius turn of phrase.