Waiting for Baudot
Once upon a time, oh, a very long time ago, while living in another galaxy altogether, I had a very dear friend, a student at another university from where I was laboring. She was, of course, poor as a pauper, that being the proper state for a student and all that. She had no telephone.
Now I, good geek that I was, found that hard to imagine, but my pleas fell upon poverty burdened ears and no phone materialized. I was bereft because, although this was well before the time of email, and the USPS really was able to deliver my ever so important words to her, I was impatient. If I wanted to say, “I’ll be passing through your town on Thursday,” there was no way to do that. At least, no way before Thursday. In the process, I discovered that I really don’t like waiting for communications. I mean, I REALLY don’t like waiting for words or bits to travel.
Eventually, email was invented, cell phones were created, networks proliferated, and when I want to make contact over something not so trivial (in my mind, of course), it is usually possible to find a way to get the word out. Yes, I do see an advantage to store and forward messaging, where one can read the mail at a convenient time, not interrupting a conversation with the boss about the raise so desperately needed. A wait of hours, days, eons, really still gets me in the nervous system. The brain sends out “Warning! Warning! Person not responding.”
I mutter, “Yeah, sure, so shut up about it. I got that message.”, but the yammering goes on.
My, we do get spoiled, don’t we.
... and if you don't know Baudot, look here.
posted by AkLewy at 1:40 PM
2 Comments:
I have something to say on this, but I'm kind of hungry, so I'm going to go eat now. I'll tell you later.
I was only joking, I'm not really needlessly cruel, so I won't leave that last comment hanging that way. I have an interesting mix of patience and impatience. Impatience, for me, does apply in the case of communication. Email is a great thing, as it lets me get my message to another very quickly, but the waiting, sometime of days, for a response is often very painful unless I push myself to move on to other things.
I actually get impatient waiting for someone to finish typing their message in an instant messenger conversation. When I see at the bottom of an IM window the little message that "X is typing a message" I get happier, knowing that their response is being composed, but simultaneously impatient for them to hit the Enter key. (Incidentally, the phone just rang, and I assumed it was you calling, having already seen my first joking comment.) The worst thing in an IM conversation is when the "X is typing a message" text appears and then disappears again as the person deletes whatever they just wrote. I long to know what they were going to say.
Now, I really am going to go eat something.
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