Today is Training Day, as is tomorrow, as was yesterday and the day before that.
The new computer system here at the ever-lavish PG requires that the average worker bee sit for roughly 16 hours of instruction on how the new system differs from the old system. Training Day in this context differs from the Denzel Washington film of the same name principally in that there is less gunplay and fewer appearances by Dr. Dre, although they certainly couldn't hurt.
Doc would make as much sense as anything else, so far.
The preceding statement is no reflection on the instructors and certainly not a slap at the new technology, but rather a typically scathing assessment of my own aptitudes. There's never been any need to describe my own technological IQ beyond the simple, hurtful truth that I've never been fully dissuaded that the Beatles are not actually singing to me from inside the radio.
One time in five, I can peer inside a toilet tank and figure out why the damn thing won't stop running. Not two times in five. If I accidentally fix it, I walk around like I've just finished designing the software necessary to successfully adjust the Hubble space telescope.
Technology chased me from the broadcast portion of the journalism program in college ("No thanks, I'll just carry this notepad," I explained), and has pretty much been chasing me ever since. In 29 years in the newspaper game, I've been "trained" on approximately 14 different incarnations of what is, for my purposes, still just a glorified typewriter.
A typewriter, for those of who haven't yet turned 90, was a contemporary of the cotton gin, which involved a lot less perspiration.
The first advance was called, I believe, the electric typewriter.
"Are you nuts?" I said to the first IBM Selectric I sat at. "I'll kill myself on this thing. It goes zero to 60 in two seconds! If I nod off and my head hits the keyboard, that little ball with all the letters on it is going to fly off and stick in my eye socket."
Of course, that never happened, which is not to say that I didn't almost kill myself on various other rungs of the technological ladder. The rung closest to death was undoubtedly the teleram, which is hardly its official name but what we all somehow called it, minus the bitter, seething expletives. The teleram was a circa 1978 contraption designed for writers who were never in the office but had to file stories from distant points, mostly ballparks, all over America. It had maybe a six-inch screen above a standard keyboard, weighed close to 30 pounds, could not be included in checked baggage, and always made you feel real glamorous as you walked it to Gate Z-97 at O'Hare.
The great technological leap of the teleram was that it had an on-board digital cassette that recorded screens of type in blocks, then transmitted the recorded blocks to the home office in a matter of seconds. Provided you hit the right keys. Playing the teleram was, from a fingering standpoint, no more complicated than being the principle oboist of the London Philharmonic. Once, in Los Angeles, where, because of the time difference, the trick was to write the story of a baseball game as it happened and send it home the minute the last out was made, I hit the wrong key, erasing 750 spastically chosen words at the stroke of deadline. I have seen telerams thrown from press boxes for exactly this reason, their circuit boards splattering over the expensive seats behind home plate.
Being of sound mind even in an advanced state of techno-retardation, I took mine into the office for repair on the next home stand.
"What's the problem?" asked the teleram tech.
"Well, to begin with, the text on the screen is wavy and blurry, like the horizontal hold isn't working," I said.
"What do you do when that happens?" he said.
"I bang it on top with a closed fist," I said, technically.
"What if that doesn't work?" he said.
"Then I unscrew the top panel and reach in, grab this circuit board in the back, and shake it back and forth a little." I said.
"Uh-huh," he said. "And do you unplug it when you do that?"
"No," I said, "Should I?"
"Well," he said, "See this copper coil here?"
"Uh-huh," I said.
"If your hand slips off the circuit board and you contact this coil while it's plugged in, you're dead."
Fortunately, when I fainted onto the keyboard, there was no little IBM Selectric typewriter ball to fly off and stick in my eye socket. Thank God for the relentless advance of technology.
I used to assume that the ever-slickening technological landscape of newspapering was designed to give me more time to write. What a moron. When I wrote everything on a typewriter and had to hand each page to a telecopier jockey who took six to eight minutes to transmit each page to the office (if his machine even worked), the deadline was usually midnight for the next morning's paper. Now that I can move 750 words 750 miles in 750 thousandths of a second, my Sunday column is due the Wednesday before.
Come to think of it, if this column isn't done soon, someone will come and just ta . . .