The Totem Pole

It's really a lot of fun being the youngest full-time employee in the office. You don't realize the mini-adult community that a university town like College Station has until you go back to living outside of its city limits. For four years, I operated in an environment that is almost entirely run by college students. The streets are populated with young adult drivers, all events center around the 18-23 age bracket, and large university programs such as Fish Camp or the Memorial Student Center are entrusted to the care of a group that doesn't even qualify to rent a car under their own name. But once you step into the ominous "real world", you take a long, quick slide down the totem pole into a place where experience is everything and you don't have any. But used properly, this outsider status can be turned into an afternoon of comedy. As co-workers discussed their memories of Ronald Reagan, I take the opportunity inform them that he was inaugurated just one month before I was born. I particularly enjoy the shock on their face whenever I point out ancient events that they witnessed such as, "You were alive when Elvis died?!" See what I mean? There's a silver lining behind every cloud. Particularly though, my favorite question would have to be, "What in the world did y'all do before [insert new technology here] was invented?"

Email. Instantaneous communication. Irreplacable, if you ask me. With the tap of a few keys and the click of a mouse, away goes a correspondence that will be greeted to the receiver's attention with that doorbell inbox chime. Concerned that someone you sent the email to will lie and say they never got it? You can thank some programmer for the creation of the read receipt. Touche, dishonest email user. But the best feature is being able to keep up with friends and family whenever you want. Some people would say to just pick up the phone, but you know as well as I do that, all too often, a letter is all you need. Just a simple but meaningful piece of conversation to check up on them and see how things are going. My inbox chimed at me just recently with an email from a good buddy of mine, Matt Giese, a great friend I met in college. His message brought to mind a story that needs to be preserved; a tale of three inspired young men who set out on a journey to find the Great Goose, the magnificent creature that would bring fame and fortune into all of their lives. Since what was intended to be a segue of office technology to email to the story of the Giese Goose has turned into a short story of its own, I will hold onto this gem for another day. It's a story worth hearing; just not yet.

Instant Messenger. To my young adult readers, I could have conveyed this to you with a multitude of acronyms. AIM. MSN Messenger. Y!. For the older crowd whose pre-teen children have not yet discovered it, I'll give you a breakdown. To register, all you need is a clever nickname to distinguish you from the millions of others out there who are logged on in scores of other countries. Think of it as a CB radio handle on steroids. Others who have this program need only to be logged onto the Internet and have your name on their "buddy list". Once you sign on, these people are alerted to your presence. Pessimists and nay-sayers to this software would argue that it has killed the personable forms of communication that were once relied on in the past. Conversation has been thrown aside for convenience, and emotion is indecipherable through text. I would argue just the opposite. After I graduated college, so many adults encouraged me to keep in close contact with my friends. The difficulty is not necessarily in calling that person but worrying if you will have enough to talk about. The chat window of an instant messenger frees my generation of this burden. Short, quaint notes are completely accepted through this medium, so it highly increases the number of friends you can keep in touch with, free of the possibility of boring embarassment. For those in college, you know the advantage to organizing a get-together with one quick copy-paste function. Don't share this with too many people but my dorm roommate and I even reached the point of chatting back and forth to each other while we were in the very same room, sitting back-to-back. Sure, it was a joke to a certain degree, but you'd be surprised how effective it was.

Computers. Even in admiring the subtleties that technology has granted my generation, how could I pass over the basic tool that brought it all. So many times I catch myself in the assumption that information was always able to be broken down into binary ones and zeroes. Forget email and messenging; how about just plain filing? To me, sorting involves having two windows open and dragging several descriptive icons from one folder to the next. Treehuggers should be worshipping the early programmers for saving forest after forest by reducing paper to point-and-click files! Just yesterday, as I was grabbing an envelope from downstairs in the office, I noticed a dark-gray plastic box sitting on the shelf, collecting dust. Curious, and honestly just stalling before I went back to my office, I brushed off the casing and lifted the lid. Once the dusty smoke cleared, I found that our office in fact still owned a typewriter. I can't imagine what it would still be used for, but if you ask me, I'll stick with my Microsoft Word and Excel.

If you push aside the heavy layers of sarcasm, you would find a young adult that realizes the tables will turn all too quickly. I failed to mention that the ones I cause to reminisce about actually remembering Reagan's presidency typically have a response of their own. "Your time is coming." Yeah, I know, I know. As fast as these months are flying by, I'm afraid that before I know it I'm going to be 50, having people ask me about the Bonfire collapse of '99 or the September 11th tragedy of 2001. Hopefully they'll quiz me about more positive things like "how cool was it to be around for the theater release of the first three Star Wars episodes." From my front porch gravity chair on the lunar space colony, I'll say, "Now them were the good ol' days. Robots had not yet replaced all human jobs, and Bill Gates and George Lucas still hadn't purchased Europe, Asia, and both Americas." For now though I'll continue to scrape for whatever comedy I can here at the bottom of the totem pole. I definitely am aspiring to rise to the top, so if my twisted humor and knowledge of technology must fall to the wayside, I think that's a consequence I'll be happy to deal with.