"Bat's dos, I can't work it out."
"Well?"
Zaphod knocked his two heads together in irritation and gritted his teeth.
"Okay," he said. "Computer!"
The voice circuits sprang to life again.
"Why, hello there!" they said (ticker tape, ticker tape). "All I want to do is make your day nicer and nicer and nicer . . ."
"Yeah, well, shut up and work something out for me."
"Sure thing," chattered the computer," you want a probability forecast based on . . ."
"Improbability data, yeah."
"Okay," the computer continued. "Here's an interesting little notion. Did you realize that most people's lives are governed by telephone numbers?"
A pained look crawled across one of Zaphod's faces and on to the other one.
"Have you flipped?" he said.
"No, but you will when I tell you that . . ."
Trillian gasped. She scrabbled at the buttons on the Improbability flight-path screen.
"Telephone number?" she said. "Did that thing say telephone number?"
Numbers flashed up on the screen.
The computer had paused politely, but now it continued.
"What I was about to say was that . . ."
"Don't bother, please," said Trillian.
"Look, what is this?" said Zaphod.
"I don't know," said Trillian, "but those aliens--they're on the way up to the bridge with that wretched robot. Can we pick them up on any monitor cameras?"
I have spent a lot of my life sitting in front of wretched computers, doing wretched computer work. As an undergraduate in college, I spent the better part of five years taking programming and math classes, learning the ins and outs of a now practically extinct computer language called Turbo Pascal. I can't begin to tell you how many thousand lines of code I wrote in that language. As I was nearing the end of my undergraduate days, Turbo Pascal was already going the way of the stegosaurus.
Of course, I've sat in front of computers for hours, writing papers and essays and short stories and poems during my graduate school days. In my healthcare career, I've spent hours in front of computers, registering patients, typing up surgical schedules, entering billing charges, answering e-mails, completing online education. And now, the future of college education: online classes. I've taught three online classes in my career at the university, interacting with my students virtually.
Computers and smart phones have become as common as toilet paper in the modern world. Everybody uses them. People get up in the morning and immediately check their phones to see if anybody has liked their Facebook posts or sent them a text message. The last thing people do at night is pretty much the same--check their Facebook posts and text messages again. I guess you could call it virtual living.
I, myself, am sitting alone in my kitchen right now, typing this blog post, pretending to talk to all of my unseen and unknown blog friends out there. It's a way of being a part of the world without being a part of the world, if you get what I mean. Frankly, when I get home at night, after dealing with people all day, I find the solitude of a blinking, silent computer a little comforting. Computers don't complain about grades or doctor's appointments. They don't have feelings to hurt or respect. Their only need is a power source. Plug them in and forget about them, if you want.
As you can tell, I have a love/hate relationship with computers. I've had this relationship since my undergraduate days. At the moment, I would be in love with any computer that could grade and comment on stacks of student papers. That is what is in store for me this evening, after I hit the "publish" tab on this post. Lots of time with a red pen and dead trees.
I know there are people out there at the moment perusing/skimming this blog post. You may be reading it just a few minutes after I send it out into the world. You may be reading it five years from now. Ten years. A hundred years. Maybe you're doing research on my life for some reason. Perhaps I won the Nobel Prize in Literature twenty years from now for my virtual literary contributions. Perhaps all of my 4,413 current posts have been collected in volumes of books. (Books were these objects that existed, containing words printed on bound pages of papers. People read them. Cherished them.) Maybe, in the future, I'm an erstwhile Emily Dickinson, surrounded in mystery and questions, my blog posts dissected and reflected by admiring fans.
For those researchers out there, let me set the record straight about a few things. I'm a poet. Currently, I hold the position of Poet Laureate of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. (Yes, that was an actual thing back in the day.) I've been married to my wife for almost 25 years. My teenage daughter is about to graduate from high school in less than a month. My ten-year-old son got into trouble on the school playground today with a group of boys, and he currently wants to become an elementary school dropout and embark on a lucrative career in computer gaming. I'm a contingent professor at a university, which means I do all the work of full-time professors without the compensation or recognition or respect of my full-time colleagues. And, at the moment, I'm feeling fairly overwhelmed by life and the world.
And now, Saint Marty has to respond to some important e-mails.
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