Menage a quatre

Technology makes your life easier. But first it complicates matters. For starters you have to get your machines to talk to each other. This should be easy. . .if they’re all new models. Consider my recent predicament.

It was the weekly deadline for my column. Ordinarily I would write my column in my notebook, type it onto my six-year-old iBook James Tiberius Kirk (simultaneously copy-editing and proofreading my handwritten draft), and email it to my editor. However, my MacBook — whose name is Marat until I make a final decision — had just arrived, and in my excitement I wrote my column in a Pages file and saved it on Marat.

Captain Kirk the iBook has an internal modem and a primitive dial-up connection. Marat the MacBook is so cool and sophisticated, dial-up isn’t even in his vocabulary. He needs wifi (or a cable modem, or ethernet) to connect to the Internet. (It is interesting to note that in Soviet Russia, internat was a home for mentally-handicapped children). I had been calling the phone company for days to apply for a broadband connection, but I had yet to speak to a human being. I kept getting the automated operator, which put me in a queue, where I would spend the next half-hour listening to ads for products I don’t want. I am tempted to get one of those little prepaid broadband things so I can get wifi wherever I go, but someone told me they were slow and problematic. Until I get broadband in my house, Marat and I have to work in the mall. And on this day, I had resolved to stay at home.

The obvious solution would have been to copy, that is to say, re-type, my column onto Captain Kirk. But that would go against the principle of having all this wonderful gadgetry about me. It would be a form of surrender. I’m not a techie, but I have no fear of technology and I refuse to be thwarted by a machine. In my observation, older people are intimidated by new gadgets (note their panic in front of an ATM) because they’re afraid they might break them. Well no machine is going to break me.

I had to figure out how to transfer the document file containing my column from Captain Kirk to Marat. It would’ve been easy if both machines were equipped with Bluetooth. Unfortunately Captain Kirk has no Bluetooth. Wait, I had a cellphone, a Sony Ericsson P1i, recently renamed Zohan because it appears in the Adam Sandler movie (I love you, Adam Sandler). Zohan has Bluetooth, so he could connect to Marat. I futzed with Marat’s network settings and tried to connect him to the Internet via Zohan’s Bluetooth. I got the two to talk, but connecting to the Internet was taking forever — the bars for “Sending” were all green, but those for “Receiving” were not lighting up.

One obvious solution was to burn my column onto a CD in Marat, put the CD in Captain Kirk’s CD-ROM drive, copy the file and email it from there. Naturally, there were no blank CDs in the house. I would have to go out to buy CDs, and if I were to go out I could just take Marat to a coffee shop, order an espresso, and use their wifi. But I had already decided to stay home and I would not be budged.

The analog solution would be to print my column and fax it to my editor. I do not have a printer in the house because I have a paper fetish and I know I would consume entire forests printing documents I don’t need in hard copy. I don’t have a fax because I just don’t.

So I considered the rest of the available equipment. I have an iPod, the wheeled variety, whose name is Eomer. Apart from music, movies, and photographs of my cats, I store important files on Eomer the iPod. Lightbulb: Copy the document file from Marat to Eomer, then transfer it from Eomer to Captain Kirk. Brilliant — except that when I connected Eomer to Captain Kirk, Kirk could not see the file. Compatibility issues.

I went back to Marat and saved my column in earlier versions of Word, .rtf, and .txt. I copied them onto Eomer, then connected to Kirk. Still nothing. Eomer could talk to Marat and to Kirk separately, but he could not mediate between them.

In the end I sent my column from Marat to Zohan via Bluetooth, and saved it as a QuickWord file. Then I used Zohan to email the column to my editor.

So I met my deadline without leaving the house, but I could not help thinking how much easier it would’ve been in olden times, say 15 years ago. I could’ve composed my column on a typewriter, summoned my serf (if I had one), and had him deliver it to the newspaper office, where my editor would look over the copy, then hand it over to a typesetter to prepare it for publication. But what would I do with all this beautiful technology?

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