Dear Boo and Bubble,
Last week, while your mom went with Aunt Bee and Captain on
their annual father/daughter retreat, I spent some wonderful time with the two
of you. We always have so much fun,
don’t we? Except perhaps for the
technological anxiety I inevitably cause with my lack of understanding of how
the TV works.
Your dad found it necessary, once again, to give me
instruction on how to switch from the X-Box back to the TV and then to the
setting where we might find NetFlix. It
had something to do with a blue switch on a little box behind the screen. On Sunday morning, while your dad tried to
sleep a little later after watching football games into the wee hours, you, Bubble,
waited patiently in your chair as I fumbled around trying to magically make
your Netflix program about big digger machines appear. I futilely tried and tried to navigate the
steps, but kept returning to the channel where your dad had ended the night -
ESPN. In desperation, I enlisted Boo’s
help. He (at 6 years old) was in the
office playing World of War Craft’s Hearthstone on the family computer which
should give some idea as to who is the most savvy of the two of us when it
comes to technology.
We couldn’t get it to NetFlix, so I decided to just check
the program guide and find something that might substitute for big digger
machines. As I scrolled down, Pokemon popped up on the Nickelodeon
channel. Since Pokemon has always been one of Boo’s favorites, he shouted for me
to select it, which I did, and the two of you settled next to each other to
watch the show.
I was very proud of myself for solving an unsolvable
problem.
The volume was a little loud so, not wanting to wake your
dad, I asked Boo to turn it down a bit.
He went to a little black box behind the screen on the opposite side
from the one with the blue switch and touched something. Even though he said he had turned down the
sound, I couldn’t discern any difference.
Both of you were so mesmerized by the TV that you didn’t notice my
sleight of move to the black box. I peered
through my bi-focals to try to find the volume control. There were three
buttons and I hit one ------- dead silence from the TV-------followed by an
incredulous “Meemaw, WHAT did you do?”
I pushed the guilty button again, figuring that whatever I
had done, I could undo. Nothing,
absolutely nothing.
Boo came over to see for himself.
“Oh, Meemaw, now see what you’ve done! You’ve moved it to the I-Phone!” he said in
total disgust.
“I-Phone,” I
thought to myself. “What’s the I-Phone got to do with it?”
It occurred to me that things are just way too complicated
anymore. Growing up, my TV had three
knobs – on/off, volume, and channel.
Simple – idiot proof. Why mess
with such a concept?
I was reminded of an editorial that Great Granddaddy Schaefer
wrote about this very same topic and I share it with you now.
“It is incredible some
of the things wrought by the hands of architects. As long as they work on the of the big
picture they mostly are credible (but not always). It is when they get to tinkering around with
the details that they screw things up in an incredible way.
There was a day when
drawing water in a motel was a simple exercise. Everybody understood the
system.
On the right had side
of the basin was a spigot with a spout.
It didn’t have to be marked “C” for one to know that spigot was for cold
water. It was universal knowledge that
if you turned the handle clockwise you got a flow of cold water, and to stop
the flow you reversed the procedure.
Also, a shared
knowledge was that the left spigot was for hot water, and it took the same two
twists to start and stop the flow. It
made no difference what motel you were staying in whether Kalamazoo, MI,
Intercourse, PA, Kennebunkport, ME, or Pelzer, SC, if it had running water,
that’s the way it worked.
Then some budding
Frank Lloyd Wright got to projecting with the idea of a common spout for the
hot and cold water. (For reasons known only to the deans of the schools of
architecture and design, architects abhor simplicity.)
After the single spout
caught on, a new school of design emerged which concerned itself wit the
rotation of the spigot handles. This new
school contended the old system (i.e., on, turn clockwise; off, turn
counterclockwise) was unnatural; that the natural movement of the right hand
and wrist was clockwise/counter-clockwise, but the natural movement of the left
hand and wrist was the opposite.
As a result the
spigots were so designed. This school of
spigot design was called the Radical School.
Next came the Neo-Radical
School. Its spigot was designed so that
the flow of water was not controlled by turning the handles but by a push-pull
or a pull-push motion.
And then came the Joy
Stick School. Some architect took flying
lessons in a Wright Whirlwind open cockpit bi-plane, and was enthralled by the
joy stick. F you wanted to go up you
pulled the stick back; if you wanted to go down you pushed the stick forward;
if you wanted to change course to port you moved the stick to the left, and if
you wanted to fly to starboard you moved the stick to the right.
Flying at 1,800 feet,
laying with the joy stick, this architect had a thought: This would be the
ideal way to design the control and flow of hot and cold water for the
bathrooms in the modern motel then on his drawing board.
Last weekend I stayed
in that motel.
I went a good half
hour figuring out his joy stick method, preparing to shave. I assumed the same system worked for the
shower, so I confidently made appropriate adjustments on the joy stick of the
shower, stepped in the tub, drew the shower curtain, pulled up the toggle in
the tub spout, and was hit with a stream of water that was liquid ice.
My mother, then Mary
when she took over, both tried their dead level best to exorcise from my
vocabulary the awful “S” word, and in the main they were successful. But when that cold water hit my chest with a
greeting from the North Pole, the last exclamation I thought of was “Oh,
Shucks!” I believe those two, who are
now saints on the other side of the river, would still not approve, but would
understand.
Mary and Mamma, the
devil didn’t make me do it, the architect did.
