AMERICAN CHRONICLES: PULL THE PLUG & RECONNECT
Copyright: John C. Merino 2015
I ran in to a contractor friend of mine at Home Depot the other day. I spend a lot of time there since retiring a few years ago. Amazing how many little jobs get ignored when you’re marching to a different drummer than your own rhythm.
We talked about the Paris slaughter, local taxes, the Comedy Center plan and what I’ve been doing since retirement.
………..”Teaching a couple courses at Mercyhurst as an adjunct professor”, I told him. We talked about family and the other politeness’ a brief encounter entails. The whole conversation lasted about a minute and a half………….and all the while he had one eye on his phone, texting someone.
Ten minutes later in the plumbing isle, we crossed paths again. He was looking for rubber boots to connect some waste pipe he was installing for a client. I helped him find them.
I had earned my papers as an industrial pipe fitter before I decided working at Love Canal in the mid 70’s……..25 feet underground building pump chambers to move the ZOOKY as we called it, to intermediate treatment facilities before it was pumped back into the city waste water system for a second treatment…….on its way to the Niagara River………….. Was not the way to earn a living. It helped me decide to go back to college and leave the chemical piping business behind.
He was still texting………….and believe it or not, he asked the same questions and said the same things we had spoken about……not ten minutes earlier in another isle.
He didn’t remember a thing we said.
The encounter got me thinking about how we communicate today.
I have an opening exercise in my Micro-Economics classes. I ask my students to hold up their phones………..turn them off and put them away…….in pockets, purses, backpacks…………wherever they are out of sight…………….but it took several weeks in to the semester before they were out of mind.
My students were actually lost in the beginning………..because they were un-tethered from their main means of communications.
You should see some of the papers I get from them. In the middle of an essay on Opportunity Costs, I’ll find what otherwise would be a witty analogy followed by a “LOL” and a Smiley Face……..as if I didn’t get the joke……an indicator that they’re in need of an Emoji fix.
Recently, my wife and I went out to dinner downtown on date night. The restaurant was filled with young couples sitting across from each other………but rather than the intimate conversations you might think were taking place…………the longing gazes and occasional soft laugh that comes from a private whispered lover’s coo………….. they were all…………..and I mean all of them………keeping one eye on their phones, texting in the middle of a sip of wine or bite of food………..rarely speaking to each other.
Other than the occasional clink of the fork on their dishes, you could have heard a pin drop.
Honestly, I think we were the only ones carrying on a conversation with our dinner…………about the quality of the meal, the kids, politics, home repairs and the like………….and I felt as if we were interrupting the other diners…………..
……….after all, how could they concentrate on texting when people at the next table were actually speaking to each other?
It’s truly gotten out of hand.
There are no interpersonal communication skills being honed these days. The simple ability to carry on a conversation is dying……
……and heaven forbid that someone says something in a tweet or on face book that is critical…………you’d think the world was coming to an end.
So, here’s my idea. Turn off the phone for one week. Give it a try. Talk face to face with those you want to interact with. Let them call you at home when they want to find you to plan an outing.
You remember the house phone……that thing with a coiled cord hanging on the kitchen wall……………sometimes connected to the latest invention…………an answering machine.
I never missed an important meeting, or date, or emergency message from anyone when I was young. Friends and family managed to reach each other when necessary………….and 8 year olds didn’t have personal phones.
When I was a kid, we had the school playground, sandlot baseball fields, bike riding………we yelled and howled and laughed in person………..and when I learned to drive, you’d just stop by a friend’s house to see if they were home……..wanted to go out that evening……..just cruise in your rusted 58 Chevy on Saturday afternoons. No appointment necessary to just stop by for a visit.
Perhaps one of the world’s problems is the inability to simply communicate in person.
It seems to me that more of that would lead to less stress and maybe build the kind of planet where face to face replaces text to text…….and tweet to tweet.
I just hate the thought that whoever is sending me messages is sitting at their kitchen table in their underwear…………scratching something.
I’d rather see their faces when we “talk” That’s what builds lasting friendships…..opens the door to understanding and removes the question………”what’d they really mean by that tweet anyway?”
(Phone rings)…………….sorry………gotta go……..I’ve got to take this call.
I’m john Merino and this is American Chronicles.
American Chronicles is a bi-weekly locally produced feature on WRFA written and produced by retired Gebbie Foundation CEO, John C. Merino. Currently, John is an Adjunct Professor of Micro-Economics, Organizational Management, and 20th Century World History at Mercyhurst University. American Chronicles airs twice monthly, Friday mornings at 7:15 and Friday Afternoons at 4:35. American Chronicles features original stories (partly fact and partly fiction), commentary on local, state , national, world conditions and more.
Find past episodes at www.wrfalp.com/tag/american-chronicles/
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