Back in the dark
ages of the 20th Century, circa 1982, I was working in New York
for a major publishing company. I wrote a few articles for some
if its magazines, but my salaried job was with the Office Services
Department. The reason is now dim, but found myself appointed
as a purchasing agent for the far-flung branch offices across
the country. They were beginning to get computerized and Apple
computers were the only personal computers then widely available.
To learn about the equipment, I persuaded the local Apple distributor
to loan me a setup I could take home for a few days. The manuals
were incomprehensible, but I learned by trial and error, and fell
in love! And bought one.
To nurture my adoration,
and find out what the manuals were talking about, I joined an
Apple users group and naturally fell into publishing its newsletter.
I wrote a monthly column, "Observations at Midnight." As a point
of nostalgia, and to show how far we have come, I offer one of
these columns here:
"The amount of literature
that crosses my desk daily would founder the most avid speed reader.
Magazines for and about the office, for and about purchasing,
and the like. Not the least of this mass of paper is dealt by
the American Management Association inviting me to seminars involving
management problems. And what is the favorite bugaboo of our sophisticated
management? "
Computerphobia.
"Everyone is scared
to death of the computer. The middle management person fears that
the ease of data entry will cause Personnel to remove his/her
secretary. The typing pool fear they will become cyborg slaves,
hooked into machines that will also damage their fertility with
the green glare from the CRTs. (Monitors were called Cathode Ray
Tubes, then.)
"The hardware companies
don't make it any easier when they advertise, so cutely, that
an 8-year-old can teach his parent how to operate his new Whatsis
- including Apple Computer!
"Some of the current
over-30 geniuses who, as under-30s used to sneer at over-30s,
are denigrating the versatility and adaptability of the over-40s
- and the worst part of this scenario is that the over-40s gibberishly
endorse this nonsense.
"I was born into the
electronic age about the time that crystal sets astounded the
world with their mystery (which puts me definitely into the over-40
category). My father, refusing to be astounded, tackled the super
heterodyne circuit and stole all my mother's baking tins for chassis
construction. By the time WWII came along, I knew all of the buzzwords
and how to trace a circuit. So, I spent the war testing aviation
radios.
"Then came television.
Horrors! It was time for fear again. We would all become bleary-eyed
zombies, fraught with sterility from cathode ray tubes. Somehow,
we managed to survive and TV has become ho-hum!
"I approached my first
CRT with a bit of awe, having heard that I was over the age limit
for understanding computers. After about an hour of fiddling with
commands and text formats, my reaction was — 'you mean that's
all there is to it?'
"After all it's only
another dumb machine that is no more intelligent than its operator.
Of course if the operator is dumb as well, then it does become
a problem!"
##
A few years ago, I
abandoned my Apple IIe when Apple stopped supporting it and concentrated
on the Mac. I bought a simple PC. Today, I am surrounded by highly
upgraded and complicated useful and user-friendly equipment. The
manuals are still incomprehensible, going into detail about how
to plug the equipment into the wall and where to turn it on. Then
they proceed to "instructions" in techno babble that only the
technicians trained in that particular piece of equipment can
understand. But you all know that drill.
I really don't care
why and how they do what they do, I just understand what they
do and we live together in harmony. Very few homes and offices
can operate without computers and the Internet. And every secretary
— pardon me, administrative assistant — demands his/her
own computerized workstation.
Has it been only 20
years?
Rima was a writer, it seems, all of her life first getting paid for her work when employed as a newspaper reporter in Rome, NY and Houston, TX. Freelancing after the war, she met David Westheimer when he was editor of the Houston Post Sunday Magazine and who bought several of Rima's stories. Her subsequent experience was as editor/writer of a couple of house organs and then as an ad agency copywriter in Houston and Hollywood.
Rima won a prize for her poem, Reflection, in the Margaret Reed Contest for Traditional Verse. The poems were published in an anthology entitled Sailing In the Mist of Time, selling on Amazon.
Rima had an active pilot's license at the time of her death. Flying, a musical play inspired by Rima's poetry, is to presented at the Huntington Beach Playhouse in November, 2007
