Just Drifting

So I now have a stylish, black, sleek  efficient-type CPU, finally. I'm not saying the specs on it because my brain doesn't really work on numbers. It has milk teeth that snap when I try and say how many gigabytes and babbly hertz the thingy has. It works superbly, and I'm terribly happy with it. My new keyboard even powers off, or goes to sleep at the touch of a little button. Wakes up, too.  And I can drift through Web 2.0 Webscapes that I couldn't visit before.

Except I can't get my headphones to work on Skype. I get all the input sounds, but my mike doesn't even so much as squeak. So I've spent the better part of two hours fiddling with speech and audio controls, getting familiar with them, without intruding in their personal space, of course. It'll take a while, but I'll get there, too.

What I lack in technical knowledge of the inner mashup of an XP, I make up for with patient forebearance and persistence. that I learned in 1973 on MUSIC when I was studying, for some unaccountable reason, economics.

At university, we used MUSIC - Michigan University Something Information Something. To hook up, you dialled the Michigan University lines and very carefully put your bakelite phone handset on a clunky modem that was moulded to accept the mouth and earpiece. The machine would then repeatedly emit dreadfully high-pitched sets of alien hormonal squeals until it  attracted the cranky attentions of the computer in Michigan at the other end of the terminal. This was a long drawn out procedure in which the two pre-historic monsters would call out tortuously to each other. Sometimes, it would take 40 minutes to get our little beastie to get the Michigan beastie to to come over and mate - and the results would climax on a teletype machine next to the terminal. And they were monsters - the computer system at our end - an IBM 360/S if I remember correctly - occupied at least two large floors and were guarded by mad scientist types in white overcoats who lived in glassed-in enclosures and  kept everyone at bay. We kow towed and made gigantic offerings of cartons of punched cards every few days to appease the beast. Most times, the guardians flung them back in our faces because the cards weren't punched in properly. Today, small solar-powered scientific calculators have more power and could leave those dinosaurs lurching in the dust, but back then, that's what we trained on, and learned patience, and awe!

Thinking back, what a gigantically long leap we've taken. Especially when I think about the hand-held devices that put computing and communication in hands reach. Especially for, say farmers, here in India. In the old days, you harvested your crop. Then sent someone out to the market - miles away in the heat, rain, mud, and sometimes pretty nice weather - to check with a powerful broker about how much they would buy your produce for. I won't go into the details, but the negotiations were long drawn and arduous and criminally loaded against the farmer whose produce was decaying by the hour, and involved much to-ing and fro-ing between homestead and market place. 14 Years ago, in crept the mobile phone, ostensibly a high end luxury good, but it was snapped up, too, by people in non-urban areas. No more fighting with bureaucratic red tape, waiting for the Government to install landlines. Just pick up the mobile and make a deal directly with your favourite wholesaler, or whatever. Whole villages chipped in to buy a single, expensive mobile phone. Boom - it dealt a mortal blow to a feudal style of working that vicitimized people, right away.

This is a rambling post. Just stuff I'm chewing on .... like how dramatically life shifts. With technology, market processes, philosophies - I remember the angst-ridden, existentialist '60s so well!,  re-written/interpreted histories, clothing, eating, and a pang of regret at how easy we had it before sci fi stuff came true, and other thoughts that only a drifter-type of person can contemplate!

By the way, I finally got a credit card. After 35 years. The last was in Washington, in 1973, and I never bothered to get another one till recently. The bank that I use in the Republic of New Delhi, against all modern common sense, did not use computers till a couple of years ago. A small hole-in-the-wall in a stuffy government building on a genteel street, it was staffed by about 12 people who catered to university professors, academicians, and researchers. While my branch is a part of a large modern Indian bank, for some unfathomable reason my branch remained mostly scruffy, un-mechanised and completely customer unfriendly. The counter people would peer through large glasses, daring you to interrupt if you drifted in through the door at any time of day, especially if it was tea time. I only managed to get signed up because I had a relative who had an account there. At the time (even now), I had no documentation such as a valid driving license to establish who I was. I mostly drifted, so I had no rent records even to establish a residential address, should (horrors!) my checks be discredited. But I needed a bank because all of my income was in the form of checks. And, after a little fuss, they made an exception in my case, based not on rules and regulations, but simply because they thought I was introduced by the right sort of person! "We believe in Trust, here," said the bank manager, eyeing me with misgivings that he let me see very briefly, to make a point.

Reluctantly, they got computers on New Years' Day in 2003 and spent stingily on training on them, preferring instead, to do an eyeball check on the person in front of them, grilling them on their savings habits, in an avuncular sort of way, and took their time over verifying your signature in large ledgers that are stacked in back, and then bristling at how little you had left for them after the check you've presented. Last year, I can't remember why, I thought it would be a good idea to get a credit card of some kind. Money goes faster these days and there's a limit to how much time one can spend in a bank trying to get your hands on your own money!

So I asked, back in October - 'Don't we have a credit card thingy here?' and was met with beetling eyebrows that clearly said, 'Never darken our floors again.' Months of patience and persistance later, one day when I went to the bank, a pall fell over as I entered. All eyes were upon me.  I shuffled my feet at the entrance. Nobody stirred. Eventually, the bank manager beckoned and came halfway out of his cabin and said, aren't you the person who asked for a credit card? I felt like an awful manipulator. I said, 'Yes'. Then, with a ceremoniousness that only a colonial-style bureaucrat can summon, he presented me with an envelope with my card and a caution, "We don't exactly know when you can use it. But try any ATM in about 5 days or so, won't you?

And then, I think I understood something about why they dragged their feet for so long. The more mechanization they have, the less human contact they will have with their customers. I, too, will miss seeing the ragged bunch that I've squabbled with over the years. In the time that it took to cash each cheque over 9 years, I got to know almost every one of them by name, what stage their kids were at, who was getting married, which one was a vegetarian, which one invariably took a longer lunch break than the other, which one twitched at the mention of an overdraft - Dickensian details that brought the whole process to life for me - and for them. One little card, and a whole realm of relationships disappear. Somehow, that's a horrible thought for me.

Of course, Shubhra is all of 22, and has no idea of what an old style bank is all about. She just got a job this year, opened an account in a flashy new bank that lavishes credit cards, discounts, loan offers, mobile banking and more on her, and anywhere she travels, she can draw money that belongs to her without anyone peering over her shoulder and clucking at the limits she's touching (except me, of course). She was near-broke and in Hyderabad where she's been posted over the last 8 months. After I'd done the old-school-grilling-of-a-profligate-daughter routine, I asked her if I could send her a thousand, and since she's never accepted money from me before, I fully expected her to say "No". This time, she said, "Yes, I need it right away!" So I immediately looked at my brand new, shiny, never used credit card, but hadn't the faintest about how to go about an electronic transfer - which, of course, she knew all about and explained to me in terms that you would use on a favored but slightly thick form of fungal mold. I didn't bother to check further with my son. In the end, I went back to my hole-in-the-wall-bank, filled out forms for 40 minutes and gave them to the fussy elderly gent with feathery wisps on his head to despatch, soonest. "Quite right, old boy ," said he, "you just can't be too careful nowadays with all these cyber crime things happening. I'll make sure your daughter has this by ten o'clock the morning."