The Price of Progress

At about 3 a.m. the morning of this writing, I was awakened by a flashing light that I at first thought was a police car in my driveway, but soon learned was emanating from the cable box sitting on my TV. The word “hold” was blinking at me as the cable box was, I believe, rebooting, something it chooses to do every so often (usually at the most inopportune time), for some reason unbeknownst to me.

This is just one of the many prices we are forced to pay for living in the ultra-advanced, ultra-convenient, sometimes ultra-pain-in-the-butt “computer age.”

Take today’s automobiles. Computers, no doubt, make it easier for mechanics to discover the source of a problem – but for the owner to perform as simple a task as changing the time on the clock, he or she has to (nine times out of ten) consult the owner’s manual. Same goes for getting rid of that “Service Due” message that, every so many miles, taunts you when you start the car. Not to mention that alarming bulletin that appears on the dashboard and panics you into driving immediately to the dealer, where, after waiting several hours, you find out was just a “computer glitch.”

And speaking of “computer glitches,” how about the ultimate one: “The computers are down,” you’re told as you try to book an airline ticket or a rent-a-car or a hotel or a Broadway show or get banking information or utilities information or even gasoline from a pump.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of computers. As a writer, I don’t need carbon paper anymore (meaningful only to those of you old enough to remember those thin, messy sheets).  Or “White-Out” (once again, doesn’t mean anything to "youngies").  And even though I’m a fairly decent speller, “Spell-Check” saves me from embarrassment every so often. Plus, e-mail ensures that I receive those polite, faintly praising rejection slips (actually, they’re not slips anymore, are they?) from The New Yorker. 

But, as I said earlier, every so often I have to “pay the price.” Like when I was in Florida and my laptop crashed. Totally. With nothing on it backed up. Fortunately, I was able to locate a repairman (albeit an obnoxious one, but at that point who cares?) who was able to bring my iBook back to life. Coincidentally, a few weeks before, in reference to a play I was writing but hadn’t printed yet, a prescient friend warned me: “Remember, you don’t have a play, you have a virtual play.”  Well, I came awfully close to not even having a “virtual play.” 

However, the enormous conveniences afforded to us by computers are well worth the occasional price, aren’t they? Unless, of course, that price happens to be the $3,000,000 that a single, unemployed mother in Orlando, FL, on July 8th, 2011, was told by Bank of America that she had overdrawn, and owed them, due to a computer error.