The perils of an increasingly technocentric society

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The perils of an increasingly technocentric society

At four o’clock in the morning, I am fumbling around in the dark trying to make some hotel coffee for the road.

Two of those little packets might produce enough coffee to fill half of my thermos, maybe enough to get us to Ohio where we’ll probably want to stop for gas and a sausage biscuit. Might be a hint of daylight by then. It’s going to be a long day.

Now in the car, Tammy is fooling around with the GPS on my iPhone, trying to sync it to my car so she can sleep for just a little bit as we navigate the small towns of Indiana and Ohio before we get to Dayton. If she could just sleep until then, she’ll be hale and hearty the rest of the way back to North Carolina. Oh, the rich and splendid conversations we’ll have if only she is well-rested! Otherwise … well, best not dwell on it.

But the damn GPS won’t sync up. My car is barely a year old. The technology in it is pretty awesome. It tells me when I need to turn my lights on when it starts getting dark, just in case I haven’t noticed. It fusses at me when I don’t drive between the lines. It even tells me when it seems I might want to pull over.

“Consider a break,” it suggests on the dashboard, this advice momentarily replacing the speedometer. The message appears underneath a cup of coffee with three little squiggly lines over to indicate the coffee is hot, unlike my driving apparently.

But the damn GPS won’t sync up, and Tammy is frustrated, rolling through screen after screen looking for an answer. We find that we can play music from my iPhone, but not get the GPS to show up. She reads instructions from Google, following them step by step with the seriousness of someone performing a tracheotomy in the wild, all to no avail. The conversations that follow are vivid, if not completely splendid.

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By the time we get to Cincinnati, the GPS suddenly comes on inexplicably, now that we no longer need it.

The following Sunday, I am at home planning to spend a long day playing catch-up on my workload. I teach several online classes, and I have a tall stack of essays and journal entries overdue for some feedback. I turn on some music, put on the coffee, and settle down into my “grading chair” for a long spell of work and jazz.

I find that I cannot log in to my college work platform. I get this message that says I am locked out due to multiple log-in attempts, even though this is my first and only attempt. I will have to try again later or contact my administrator. I try both, but nothing doing. Later, I get a message from my college administrator that there have been numerous log-in attempts from different locations, including Charlotte and Birmingham, Alabama, over the last 24 hours.

Is someone trying to hack into my account? Maybe they’ll help me with these essays! Maybe they can attend one of my committee meetings, or deal with half a dozen student issues. Come on in, I say.

But no. They didn’t get in and now neither can I. There is a link to a website attached to the email from my administrator, and it is supposed to help me reset my college email password, but all it does is reset the password to a different email address.

I am still locked out, which presents something of a quandary. My work is over there, and I am over here. If I cannot get to it, I can’t do it. I wait for a while—as instructed by the lock-out message (in bright red letters no less)—but every time I try again, I am like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football, and the log in is like Lucy, pulling it away again and again while the hours melt down into a puddle of nothing and I am even further behind than I already was.

While I am failing miserably at solving this riddle, Tammy informs me that there is a strange, unaccounted for, and quite sizable charge on our bank statement, which we are able to trace to the hospital. Evidently, we’ve paid hundreds of dollars for a procedure no one can remember having.

I have this touchingly naïve thought: I will call them.

“I’ll just give them a call and see what that’s all about,” I say.

“You do that,” Tammy says. “Let me know how it goes.”

It goes like this, if you already know the song and want to sing along. I call the hospital—our local hospital, about 4 miles down the road—and I get someone from some faraway place who is going to “help” me. Customer service has been outsourced to Timbuktu. I ask to be transferred to the business office to discuss a charge.

After some hesitation, I am transferred … to somebody somewhere. I repeat my earlier request verbatim. There appears to be some confusion, as if I just asked the person on the other end to join me for a romantic weekend in the Catskills.

It’s a hospital, and I want to speak to the business office. Surely this is not unheard of.

“Just one moment, sir.”

I am transferred again, and after three or four rings, someone picks up. But instead of a human or nearly human voice, I hear a series of very shrill, very loud screeching noises, quite rudely piercing my eardrums. Is this a fax machine? A roomful of first-graders scratching a giant chalkboard with their fingernails?

I find another number for the hospital and try that one. It’s a local number, so there is hope. Nope, there isn’t. It’s another faraway person. I go through the same series of pointless transfers until I can once again enjoy the same series of screeching noises. There is no escape, no path that will ever lead me to the business office. I know that now.

If all of the wonderful advances in technology have taught us anything, it is this: you can’t get there from here. Consider taking a break.

(Chris Cox is a writer and teacher who lives in Haywood County. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)

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