As I sat at the table in the crew mess tonight, lingering over the night’s portion of Soylent Green – or whatever – I found myself pondering the double-edged sword that is modern technology. It helps take one’s mind off the food.
The other day, Pamela and her good friend Jennifer Ligon were negotiating their way home to Appomattox from Illinois and trying to decide which was the safest route to take once they could find their way out of the snow, no easy task with the huge amounts of crystalline precipitation with which the entire Northern US has been inundated as of late.
While I have fond memories of my Wisconsin childhood, I certainly don’t miss the six months or so of Winter Wonderland. I always figured that the reason so many popular songs were written about winter was so that the composers could hire someone to shovel their driveways while they sat at the piano by a cozy fire, tickling the ivories and producing romantic little ditties about imaginary fluffy white snow while the real wet, gray crap was being piled up into impregnable driveway-blocking bulwarks courtesy of the friendly neighborhood snowplow.
But anyway, Pamela needed weather information and she needed it fast. So she reached for her trusty cell phone – trusty when it can get a signal, that is – and called a number which went through a PBX phone system in San Diego, from which it was speedily and automatically patched through to another PBX system on a lonely cargo ship anchored off the coast of Saipan in the Far West Pacific. In other words, she called me.
From the computer on my desk in the ship’s Secure Communications room, I proceeded to the National Weather Service to check for road conditions in West Virginia. Then, having been informed by me that there was snow in them thar hills, Pamela and Jennifer, the fellow travelers – not that I am suggesting in any way that they were secretly discussing Marxist-Leninist doctrine and listening intently to an audio copy of <em>Das Kapital</em>, but you never know – decided it was probably prudent to continue south and turn east at Kentucky. The weather would be better and they could still organize some coal miners. Oh, listen to me…
Anyway, there they were, driving through Ohio, hundreds of miles from home, and they called me – thousands of miles from home – to get a weather report. Could you imagine King Ferd and Queen Izzy calling up Christopher Columbus on the Nina (or the Pinto or the Santa Claus, whichever one was the flagship) and asking, “I say Chris old lad, could you look up the driving conditions for Barcelona?” They just didn’t do those things back in the day. Probably because they couldn’t, but that is only my theory.
Of course, modern technology cuts both ways. It cost me a trip to Thailand. A good portion of our Navy staff is headed that way in a few days. Now, back in the good old days of World Wars, no staff would even think of leaving without their trusty communications officer, but these days all we have to do is go into our e-mail and message programs, type in a few simple instructions, and it all gets forwarded to them, no muss, no fuss, and no trip to an exotic locale for me. Curses!
On the bright side, having them all gone means no morning meetings so I can sleep in and not shave or bathe. I can lie in my room or sit in my little comm shack and relax, checking my Facebook and Twitter pages as my body ferments and my beard grows to Rasputin-like proportions. By the time the Navy gets back, I will be the Mad Hermit of the Comm Shack. Beware! Unclean! Accompanied by assortments of growling and gnashing of teeth…
So, bon voyage, shipmates! Enjoy your time in Thailand while we rabble remain behind to do your bidding. Bring me back something. Soap, if they have it.
