Radio Amateur KC2HMZ wrote:

On Fri, 15 Aug 2003 22:59:03 GMT, Its (The Dawn
Soliloquy) wrote:

I agree with your entire post, but your statements following are so revealing
of the 21st century citizen. Simple concepts of technology that so many people
are oblivious to.

Cable TV sales pitch voice ON

"But wait - there's more!"

cable TV sales pitch voice OFF

Some of my more observant neighbors have figured out (1) that I'm a
ham, and (2) that therefore I'm some sort of an electronics expert.
Maybe it's the ARES and SKYWARN decals on my van. Maybe it's the five
antennas. Maybe it's the rugged good looks and
steely-eyed...ahem...well, anyway...today as I'm getting out of my
van, one of the neighbors accosts me in the parking lot to ask if I
can take a look and see if I can figure out why her phones don't work.
People ended up calling her on her cell phone because her landline
phone was busy for something like 4 hours.

I go over there, walk in the kitchen, there's the phone on the wall,
your typical $8 wall phone bought from a five-and-dime. I pick up the
receiver, listen...I hear the steady tone you hear after a phone's
been off the hook for so long the switch gets tired of playing the
recording telling you to hang up your phone. I hang it up...pick it
up...same sound. I ask her if she has another phone.

"I have my cell phone," she replies, holding up her tiny little Nokia
piece of junk in designer colors.

I begin to wonder if there's a computer or something that has the
phone off the hook. I ask what else she has that connects to the phone
company's lines. She says nothing. No computer, no answering machine,
no nothing.

"Hmmm....what were you doing when the power went out?"

"I was...oh! I was talking on the phone in the bedroom, I forgot about
it. But it's a cordless phone, it doesn't connect to the phone line."

You can guess now, right? When the power went off and her base unit
went dead, she simply put the handset down and walked away. When the
power came back on, the handset was still off hook. She was surprised
to find out that that thing she hangs the handset up onto when she's
done with it really is more than just a battery charger for the
handset, and is actually connected to the telco jack.

"Who hooked this up for you?"

"My ex-husband," she said, her eyes narrowing with lingering hatred as
she launches into the story of how he dumped her for some...well, use
your imagination. I'm letting it go in one ear and out the other,
thinking to myself, "Want me to tell you why he left? :-) "

She's a blonde. I'm thinking of getting her some black hair dye next
Christmas. It'll raise her IQ a hundred points if she uses it.

Probably an urban legend, an e-mail that I have received on occasion is a
story about a woman standing by her car, the woman is crying. She's holding a
small plastic electronic implement, trying to goad the implement into working.
A concerned stranger approaches, and asks her about her problem. She asks him
if he knows of a store where she can buy watch size batteries, it's seems that
her automatic car door unlocker is no longer working. The stranger asks if the
small electronic device is in fact attached to her key chain, to which she
replies yes. He takes the key chain, finds the correct key, and unlocks her
car door.

Problem solved.

Why is this story so easy to believe in the modern world?

Because the average person is basically clueless as to how things
work, and our society is currently a disposable society where if it
doesn't work you throw it out and buy a new one. Also because once
such people become used to using technology they forget what they used
to do before they learned to apply it.


The second reason you give is something I completely agree with. But
our disposable culture, supported by mass production, actually makes
it "smarter" in some ways to ignore how a thing works. Why bother to
figure out how to repair your portable CD player when you can get a
new one for $20?

But the first reason you give, that I take issue with. I don't think
the "average person" is more clueless as to how things work in this
world than a century ago. The seeming distinction is due to the
increase in the number of "things that work" and the resulting
specialization of knowledge.

HAMS are not necessarily more clued into "how things work" outside of
radio and the electricity knowledge they employ. I cannot count how
many times I've tuned in to Hams discussing their computer issues. 3
or 4 guys spouting utter rubbish about simple concepts (like OS vs.
app., or firewall vs. antivirus), giving out advice that is bound to
fail, or trying to figure out why emails sent to "www.website.com"
won't get through.

Just because a guy can build a radio out of a bin of metal recyclables
doesn't mean s/he can change the oil in the car, poach an egg, or post
to usenet.

My 2 cents.


Care to guess how many stores stayed open after their power went out,
and how many had to close because the cash registers weren't working
and the morons working there can't figure out how much change you get
from your dollar after you buy a $0.74 item unless the cash register
tells them to fork over your $0.26?

73 DE John, KC2HMZ
There's a sucker born every minute. -- P.T. Barnum

--
Col. I.P. Yurin
Commissariat of Internal Security

Stakhanovite
Order of Lenin (1937)
Hero of Socialist Labor (1939)

Radio Amateur KC2HMZ wrote in message . ..
On Fri, 15 Aug 2003 22:59:03 GMT, Its (The Dawn
Soliloquy) wrote:

I agree with your entire post, but your statements following are so revealing
of the 21st century citizen. Simple concepts of technology that so many people
are oblivious to.

Cable TV sales pitch voice ON

"But wait - there's more!"

cable TV sales pitch voice OFF

Some of my more observant neighbors have figured out (1) that I'm a
ham, and (2) that therefore I'm some sort of an electronics expert.
Maybe it's the ARES and SKYWARN decals on my van. Maybe it's the five
antennas. Maybe it's the rugged good looks and
steely-eyed...ahem...well, anyway...today as I'm getting out of my
van, one of the neighbors accosts me in the parking lot to ask if I
can take a look and see if I can figure out why her phones don't work.
People ended up calling her on her cell phone because her landline
phone was busy for something like 4 hours.

I go over there, walk in the kitchen, there's the phone on the wall,
your typical $8 wall phone bought from a five-and-dime. I pick up the
receiver, listen...I hear the steady tone you hear after a phone's
been off the hook for so long the switch gets tired of playing the
recording telling you to hang up your phone. I hang it up...pick it
up...same sound. I ask her if she has another phone.

"I have my cell phone," she replies, holding up her tiny little Nokia
piece of junk in designer colors.

I begin to wonder if there's a computer or something that has the
phone off the hook. I ask what else she has that connects to the phone
company's lines. She says nothing. No computer, no answering machine,
no nothing.

"Hmmm....what were you doing when the power went out?"

"I was...oh! I was talking on the phone in the bedroom, I forgot about
it. But it's a cordless phone, it doesn't connect to the phone line."

You can guess now, right? When the power went off and her base unit
went dead, she simply put the handset down and walked away. When the
power came back on, the handset was still off hook. She was surprised
to find out that that thing she hangs the handset up onto when she's
done with it really is more than just a battery charger for the
handset, and is actually connected to the telco jack.

"Who hooked this up for you?"

"My ex-husband," she said, her eyes narrowing with lingering hatred as
she launches into the story of how he dumped her for some...well, use
your imagination. I'm letting it go in one ear and out the other,
thinking to myself, "Want me to tell you why he left? :-) "

She's a blonde. I'm thinking of getting her some black hair dye next
Christmas. It'll raise her IQ a hundred points if she uses it.

Probably an urban legend, an e-mail that I have received on occasion is a
story about a woman standing by her car, the woman is crying. She's holding a
small plastic electronic implement, trying to goad the implement into working.
A concerned stranger approaches, and asks her about her problem. She asks him
if he knows of a store where she can buy watch size batteries, it's seems that
her automatic car door unlocker is no longer working. The stranger asks if the
small electronic device is in fact attached to her key chain, to which she
replies yes. He takes the key chain, finds the correct key, and unlocks her
car door.

Problem solved.

Why is this story so easy to believe in the modern world?

Because the average person is basically clueless as to how things
work, and our society is currently a disposable society where if it
doesn't work you throw it out and buy a new one. Also because once
such people become used to using technology they forget what they used
to do before they learned to apply it.

Care to guess how many stores stayed open after their power went out,
and how many had to close because the cash registers weren't working
and the morons working there can't figure out how much change you get
from your dollar after you buy a $0.74 item unless the cash register
tells them to fork over your $0.26?

73 DE John, KC2HMZ
There's a sucker born every minute. -- P.T. Barnum

And I am assuming you could figure that out in a matter of seconds? I
really don't call people working long hours to earn a living "morons"
I guess your life and job is so great that you can call cashiers and
supermarket folk like me morons? You can, but it don't offend me.

Care to guess how many stores stayed open after their power went out,
and how many had to close because the cash registers weren't working
and the morons working there can't figure out how much change you get
from your dollar after you buy a $0.74 item unless the cash register
tells them to fork over your $0.26?

73 DE John, KC2HMZ
There's a sucker born every minute. -- P.T. Barnum

And I am assuming you could figure that out in a matter of seconds? I
really don't call people working long hours to earn a living "morons"
I guess your life and job is so great that you can call cashiers and
supermarket folk like me morons? You can, but it don't offend me.


I don't call hard working people morons either; but the inability to
calculate the change from a dollar for 74 cents in under a second
betrays a terrible lack of education at the very least. I find it
amusing, and sad, to have the correct change in my hand while the clerk
is using a machine to figure out the taxes and the total - some of them
are genuinely bewildered when they finally figure it out and realize I
have the amount in my hand. Mind you some of the old folks working at
Wal-Mart and McDonalds can do it even faster than I can. Hell my
Grandmothers (both of them) could do hexadecimal mental math instantly
(so can my wife); they just don't call it hex. The old saying is true,
a mind is a terrible thing to waste.

Dave

Radio Amateur KC2HMZ wrote:
Power went out here at about 4:15 PM, came back on at about 6:30 PM.
However, two blocks from here, the power still isn't on yet, and as
I'm writing this it's now past 11PM. On my way home, saw lots of folks
sitting out on their porches with gas lamps. Some of them even think
the phones aren't working. If they tried a real phone instead of their
$5 drugstore cordless whose base unit is without power, they'd find
that the phones are working just fine - the landline phones that is.

I don't know how it works in your city, but here in Toronto
the low voltage on the telphone lines is provided by
telephone carrier's various central offices, which have
about 8 hours of backup power supply. I'm not sure what the
situation is beyond the central offices, but needless to say
that the landline telephone service would be affected by
prolonged power outages.

--
M2