he said she said they said it said

[insert smartphone text notification sound after each entry below, as appropriate, or inappropriate: piano tinkling, bell chime, shotgun, thunder, guitar twang, lion's roar, fart, burp, post-orgasmic sigh, trumpet blare, car horn, alarm, jet roar . . . ]

Dad: where are you?

Mom: hey, you.

Girlfriend: wyd

Friend A: 'sup?

Brother: hi there

Dad: frown emoji

Ex-gf from 1986: Where ya been all my life?

Sister:  where've you been today

Friend B: wtf

Girlfriend: wya

Friend C: wanna hang out

Ex-gf from 2015: Netflix n chill?

Girlfriend: whats your problem

Sprint: your bill is available online

Other brother: you got 20 bux till tmrw???

Friend C: hey, can I borrow like 20$

Mom: hello????!!???

Girlfriend now ex-gf: fuck offfuck you, you fuk and I'm pregnant

Dad: do you have the keys to the Mustang?

Ex-gf from 2018: I had your baby did you know dat

Friend A: u alive?

Ex-gf from 2015: Im in Kazakhstan dickface

Sister: u no i luv you dontcha

Mrs. Rivers, 7th grade English teacher: it's a gerund; know it now!

National Grid: your bill is overdue. your power will be cut off . . .  

Sister Mary Aloysius Gonzaga de Porres: that's a mortal sin

Dad: HELLO?

Brother: are you coming over now or not?

Dr. Ozcomert: are you breathing?

John Angleterre, boss:  Please be advised your position, and you in that position, have been terminated. Do not enter the premises under any circumstances under pain of arrest.

Sister: g'night love you talk tmrw

Private Number: Your appointment with Probation has been canceled. Please be advised it would be prudent if you were to assume a new name and Social Security number. Leave town now. Better yet, if you have a passport, leave the country. STAT.  

Assumption Day

The food delivery app cowbell sounded, meaning here's an offer to accept or reject. The pickup was at the Brooklyn Pickle. I live close enough to walk there. I often have, even in driving snow. I arrived. I clicked on the "arrived" button on my phone screen. The app didn't respond. A series of prompts in effect said proceed anyway. Then the young woman behind the counter said, "We don't have an order under that name; are you sure it isn't the other Brooklyn Pickle?" Slap of the forehead. Doh moment. Sure enough, looking more closely at my phone screen, it was the sandwich shop on the other side of town.

I assumed it was the Brooklyn Pickle where I had picked up food half a dozen times. I never considered the possibility that it could be the other one.

So much for assumptions.

Good thing it wasn't in Brooklyn.

I had made a realistic and reasonable assumption, given the data available, given the weight of my personal history, my proximity, and the app's fine-tuned propensity to cherrypick close places. They know where I am!

A realistic and reasonable assumption but wrong just the same.

It didn't especially rattle me. It was my first assignment of the day, and I wasn't going to let this assumptive hiccup throw me off stride.

While en route to deliver the next order, small enough to pass up, the app informed be "$0.00 tip." WTF? Cheapskate! As I was driving, I formulated potential responses:

Lose some of the food.

Squash it.

Eat it.

No. None of that.

Try some finesse.

Tell the person: "You better check your app."

Oh yeah, why is that?

"The tip feature must be frozen."

Could I go against my grain and deliver the malfunctioning app line without rancor, with an unctuous and ingratiating smile like Eddie Haskell on "Leave It to Beaver"? Not likely. But worth a try, to make a point

I entered the customer's residential complex, a sprawling mini-campus of four buildings, all with locked sliding intercom-controlled gates.

I called the guy, politely telling him to come on out and meet me by the gate. Since he didn't give me a tip, I wasn't about to ask him to open the gates so I could then conveniently proceed to the front door at the top of the hill. Make him work a little, make him pay for his stinginess.

He sauntered down.

We exchanged cordial greetings.

Just before I was about to hand him the food, he handed me three folded bills, American currency.

We delivered mutual hearty thank yous. They sounded sincere, his and mine.

So much for assumptions, the sequel.

I was relieved I had not impetuously launched into my gift-wrapped rebuke. Plus, I felt kind of stupid, and small.

I readily say that now, in hindsight, but I know what I was capable of, on the negative and on the false-positive side. And it all rode on the train of a false assumption.

Human Assumption Encounters (HAEs) populate my day, every day. I assume:

• they got the text
• they read the text, or understood it they way I intended
• they got and listened to the voicemail
• the driver in the other vehicle saw me or saw my signal
• you heard what I said and got the meaning I was trying to deliver
• you understood my motive and tone
• what the other's silence meant
• what the facial expression signified
• what the tone of voice signified  
• why someone did this or that
• why someone didn't do this or that
• why I got no reply
• why the service was slow, incomplete, or in error
• the reason for the long line or the delay 

I assume you face the same or similar HAEs in your day, too. 

Hard 2 Get

Does abstinence make the heart grow fonder? How about calmer?

As our “devices” own us ever more, we hear talk of digital fasting and abstinence. (It’s curious how in America the primary meaning of “device” is an electrical invention connected to the internet, a meaning that supersedes older denotations such as scheme, trick, plan, rhetorical tool, or signifying mark. It is also instructive that the roots of the word go back to both “discourse” and “division.”)

Don’t be alarmed. This is not a sermon preaching a Luddite message of unplugging, however worthy that be.

This is something else.

Does the less you connect make you that much more coveted? The novelist Thomas Pynchon is legendary for his elusiveness, his absence. Photographs of the author are rare. J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye, was famously anonymous, to use an oxymoron, even though he was living in plain sight in Cornish, New Hampshire. Their unreachability presumably made reaching out to them all the more alluring. When we see a sign that warns us to avoid “WET PAINT,” we want to touch it.

I have a friend, who happens to be a writer, who has never had and does not now have a cellphone. That makes him singular in my universe. (Actually, not so: my mom, 101 years old, had a cellphone she never used and does not have one now.)

Does this lack of a device make such people “special”? I have my doubts. From my vantage, such folks surrender such status by relying on other cellphone users to breach the digital divide.

My personal history in this vein is inconclusive. I resisted owning a smartphone because I thought the device would own me. I surrendered in 2015. Although upgrading my phone had little to do with feeling either more or less connected, I couldn’t be special anymore by smugly declaring, “Oh. I don’t own a cell. You kidding? Not me.”

I would suggest that the business world and the personal world abide by different social norms regarding digital abstinence, fasting, and promptness — a category similar to fasting, though paucity and duration are different aspects.

As for my own personal world, my data set is a small sample: one person with a limited circle of family, ex-wives and girlfriends, friends, and acquaintances.

I aim for a daily text to my children. Some days I miss. If any of us were to go silent for more than a day, two the most, we would find a need to check in more actively.

What about intimate friends (there’s a euphemism if there ever was one)? What are the 21st century protocols — if any — for response rapidity and frequency? What is the fine line between playing hard to get and crossing over into the phenomenon of ghosting? Is the notion of “hard to get” an ancient artifact of another century?

If I am interested in someone, my obsessive personality makes it nearly impossible to refrain from checking my phone (ahem, device) for any morsel of communication at any hour of day or night or under any circumstance, time, or place.

Is this constant temperature gauging an infinite neurosis, or merely the commonplace anxiety of the modern age?

Send me a text. Now. Don’t leave me waiting.

Liar, Liar Pants on Spider

While on the phone attempting to make a semi-demi-quasi-para-business call, I heard a loud and frantic shriek from my daughter. It sounded as if she were [notice the subjunctive?] yelling,

"Fire! Fire!"

I hung up. I abbreviated my call, fearing incipient incendiary danger (IID).

Actually, she was yelling something about a spider, an apparently 5-inch wide, human-gobbling spider. So, it was panic over arachnid anarchic hyper-angst (AAHA).

This reminds me of a now-legendary family story.

According to my older brother, while he was at Saint Louis University in the Sixties, his friend apparently once wanted to engage in a conversation about the television show "Outer Limits," which was misheard as "Arnold Loomis," so Arnold Loomis forever became the Patron Saint of Miscommunication.

The Says-pool

I heard a radio commercial this morning referring to the Internet as the "information superhighway."

Whew, I hadn't heard that one in a long time.

I never felt that metaphor worked. It is typically invoked by advertisers promising high-speed Internet service, allowing users to drive up the information ramp quickly, yadda-yadda.

I'm reminded of something Henry David Thoreau wrote:

"We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate."

What is a good metaphor for the Internet?

I think it's more like a river, stream, or ocean.

Or maybe a gigantic pool. Yeah, that's it.

*The says-pool.

(Of course, you might argue for sees-pool, seize-pool, or cease-and-desist-pool. But I like the fact that says-pool captures two elements of the Internet: our wading in (or diving in) to a great sea of Something-or-other interlinked like that old game of Telephone, driven by "he said-she said-he said-she said-they said-it said" ad infinitum. That said, let me note that in real life a Google search of my real name nets thousands upon thousands of entries, and maybe as many as 90% are wrong in their attribution. Almost right, but not quite. And it's all a matter of the rippling effects of misinformation upon misinformation, which can never be corrected or amended.)

Laugh. Or....

Else.

* The coinage "says-pool" is copyright 2007 by The Laughorist, Pawlie Kokonuts, and his antecedents, precedents, and malcontents.