It was still dark when Larry and I left his house, heading out in his truck for a lake some distance away. Spring is crappie time, and it’s my favorite freshwater fish to catch and eat.
By sunup we still had a good long way to go and I was hungry. The problem was the boat hitched up behind us. “There’s an overrated fast-food restaurant up ahead. Let’s get a breakfast sandwich with one of those stupid names they want me to use.”
Behind the wheel, my old fishing buddy cut his eyes across the cab. “If we go to Great Gary’s to get something to go, you won’t say Great GarMuffin, will you? Because I know for a fact you won’t pronounce Horsey Sauce at Arby’s.”
“We’re too old to pronounce dumb names like that, but my daughters have spent most of their lives trying to make me slip up and say that name at Arby’s. When the cashier asks me which one I want through that cheap crackling low-bid microphone, I tell them I want both sauces.”
“You’re getting to be a curmudgeon. You make things hard on yourself, you know.”
“Nah. I’ve aleays been a curmudgeon, but when we order in a few minutes, I’ll just use the meal’s number.”
He steered into the parking lot. “My son uses an app when he eats here.”
“No apps for me. I hate how technology has taken over our lives. People should just talk to each other without nonsensical jargon, and without using the word ‘amazing’ or ‘like’ in conversation. Besides, something would mess up, and I don’t want to struggle with it when I’m hungry.
“A man can starve to death if there’s no phone or screen nearby. I can’t even order a pizza anymore, because they won’t take calls. You have to click through their website. I just want to walk in, order, hand someone the cash, and leave.”
Because of the boat, the drive-thru was out. We parked some distance away and walked inside a video arcade instead of the overrated eatery I was expecting.
Giant touch screens flashed with colorful photos of the food and drinks on their menu. Like something from a science fiction movie, frowning people stood before the order screens with a finger poised, occasionally punching an item which vanished only to be replaced by myriad options.
Appearing to be frozen in time, folks our age were held hostage, overwhelmed with the new-fangled order process and likely wishing they’d gone through the drive-thru to be misunderstood through a cheap microphone.
In addition, most wore glasses and were trying to see through the magnification of tri-focals, their noses pointed toward the ceiling. Because we spend most of our time staring down at the phones in our hands, the sounds of grinding neck vertebrae tilting upward was deafening.
“Minimal contact,” Willie surmised. “I wonder how often they clean those screens people keep touching.”
Bypassing the zombies staring into cold white oblivion, we walked up to one of the two registers, intending to use real cash. Both devices appeared to be unplugged.
We waited for several minutes while the employees went about their business behind the counter. Customers in cars appeared and disappeared on the other side of the drive-thru window.
“Number two sixty-six!” A woman behind the counter shouted. Apparently, fast food technology hasn’t evolved enough to bypass the raspy, screeching human voice carbonized by forty years of cigarettes.
She finally saw us. “We don’t take orders there anymore. You have to use the kiosks like those folks.”
I turned toward the spellbound people staring at the screens. I wondered if they’d still be there next year, starved skeletal beings with one finger held aloft. “No. I don’t have to do anything.”
We left, and that brings us in a curiously roundabout way to how technology helped me write my first novel.
Bear with me, this is a writer’s illogical mind.
Back in the olden days, I used a typewriter, or as Mark Twain called it, an “infernal machine.” It was also slow and required much backspacing, carbon paper, gallons of Wite-Out, and lots of twisting and adjusting.
I pounded those keys for decades, first on a manual machine in high school, then a portable version in college, which kept me in beer money by typing term papers for a dollar a page.
Ah, then came the IBM Selectric, powered by electricity and not the tips of my fingers. Novels almost formed. Many of them, and they all withered by page fifty or so. I spent hours, no, days, wait, even months, pecking out those pages destined for File 13.
When I read that Micky Spillane typed with two fingers and never edited his manuscripts, I wondered what was wrong with me. He wrote I, The Jury in 19 days, and as a rookie writer, I couldn’t figure out how he did it.
Honestly, I still don’t.
Then came the 286 computer, and my writing world changed. It set me free! Fingers flew and words appeared. The process was no longer linear, and I wrote entire chapters out of order, \ and days or weeks later, plugged them into the flow of work and they fit perfectly.
The world of active electrons became my friend, allowing me to pound out two, three, or four thousand words a day to build the structural foundation of a novel.
So with those successes, why won’t I assimilate into this world of apps and self-service ordering screens? Because there’s an evil side to all this. An entire manuscript vanished into thin air one day about twenty-five years ago, and even in the last eighteen months several days’ worth of work was lost when my laptop took issue with The Cloud and refused to “shake hands,” as a technologically adept friend explained.
In my personal experience, there is always an issue waiting to arise. The one time I tried to order off a screen in McDonald’s, I wound up with two extra Happy Meals (see how they sucker us into using those ridiculous terms?), cheese on a burger I didn’t want, no coffee for the four creams I received, and the Skynet’s refusal to take the gift card that sparked the whole visit.
I finally had to get someone to boot up the register and take the entire order while standing face to face.
The final contrasting conflict is my Macbook Air, which is such a mystery that I often hides what I’ve written only to flash it on the screen when I’m checking emails.
This new world of ours is always changing, but sometimes I need a personal technical support team, for the computer and to assist with ordering food in these new updated, high-tech restaurants.
Or maybe someone about ten years old.
I’m feeling that all of these new-fangled engineering marvels, apps, and human-free self-service businesses leaves me outside in the drive-thru lane, looking in through the order window.