Nobody calls — well, scams, and automatic pharmacy reminders. That's about it. Rarely a real person. Emails too are mostly pellets from some ineffectual blunderbuss blast of scattershot PR pleas. Still, in the morning, as I scroll down in the vain effort to detect something significant, I define and delete them. Out of habit, I suppose, from the day when computer memory was limited and could fill up. A practice that was already out-of-date when this ran, 15 years ago. Back then, the column filled a page, and I've kept the original headings.
With swollen, foaming rivers of information roaring across the Internet, we flatter ourselves that the netting of relevant data is a recent skill — as if the primeval forest didn't also offer an overload of information to every prowling hunter, for whom reading the sky, culling facts from the flutter of leaves, from the sound of snapping twigs, were essential abilities, certainly more significant than our talent at finding good local restaurants online.
We data dinosaurs remember a time when we periodically drained our lakes of information — we flushed away old files, squeegeed off accumulated e-mails. Now, electronic storage capacity is so cheap that few need bother deleting anything. So it grows.
A shame, because having to dispose of something prompts you to look at it anew before consigning it to eternal oblivion — or, more accurately, before making it harder to retrieve since nowadays nothing ever really goes away.
BERRY PAINT TO BUNCHED ELECTRONS
We data dinosaurs remember a time when we periodically drained our lakes of information — we flushed away old files, squeegeed off accumulated e-mails. Now, electronic storage capacity is so cheap that few need bother deleting anything. So it grows.
A shame, because having to dispose of something prompts you to look at it anew before consigning it to eternal oblivion — or, more accurately, before making it harder to retrieve since nowadays nothing ever really goes away.
My mother phoned. "Do you know your voicemail at work is full?" she asked. "No ma," I said. I don't often phone myself at work, because when I do, I'm never there.
So I phoned my office.
"Welcome to Avaya messaging," began the mechanical lady's voice. "You have . . . two new voice messages . . . one hundred, twenty-three, saved messages. Your mailbox is full. You will be unable to send messages. You may wish to delete unwanted messages. Main menu . . ."
I "may wish?" I do wish! Let's get at them!
First the two new messages — the anonymous angry guy who has been phoning at night for years (for a taste, click the video at the end of the column). He marks his messages "urgent" — the only caller to do so. Sometimes I delete his message right away, upon hearing that it is "urgent," pausing to savor the irony. Nothing signals a communication is meaningless as clearly as it being labeled "IMPORTANT! PLEASE READ."
Sometimes I listen to the first few syllables. "Mister Steinberg, you LIBERALS make me pu . . ."
Delete. God bless voicemail.
"Thank you brother Steinberg," a minister begins, citing a few minutes I took to speak to a young man under his care.
Onward, to the 123 saved messages, wondering what that first message will be. Like an archeologist with a toothbrush, working my way backward in time.
A retired cop; a Metra engineer; a man abused by a priest. The Taiwanese Economic and Cultural Office in Chicago. The Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City.
Delete delete delete. Most I saved for the phone numbers -- quicker than jotting them down.
A few dozen messages and we're back to the fall, and the election. A campaign manager. A senator's aide. The National Confectioners Association; the BBC; the Chicago Bears; a newspaper in Norway; the American Embassy in London.
The need to cull messages is a sign of our phone system's age. The e-mail pit, which once we were periodically hectored to dredge out, has apparently become bottomless, thanks to terabytes of storage. Or are we on to petabytes by now?
There are 32,765 e-mails lingering in my e-mail queue, and nobody seems to mind.
Back to voicemail. Some I kept as a record of the caller's remarks.
"The weapon was not registered, therefore it was illegal."
One was me, a nasal voice — cripe, I do sound like Woody Allen — caught without a notebook, calling my voicemail to read words from a plaque. A clever trick — if I say so myself — to have in your bag.
A surgeon. A public defender. Leon Varjian, the man who created the Pail & Shovel Party at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the late 1970s, phoning from New Jersey.
Once this stuff is kept forever, will anybody bother with it? Scarcity creates value, and electronic communications' overwhelming quantity, coupled with its hasty, artless construction, will probably keep anybody from ever caring. Nobody is going to write a thesis on "Tweets of the Early 21st Century."
Or will they?
We haven't even read the stuff we've got. Most Egyptian hieroglyphics unearthed by archeologists still haven't been read yet.
At least I think that's true. Better check.
"There are massive amounts of demotic papyri," said Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. ("Demotic" denotes the common form of ancient Egyptian writing; it relates to the familiar bird-and-eyeball hieroglyphics the same way shorthand relates to block printing).
"It's the biggest single corpus of written records, because they used this stuff as packing for mummies."
Stein did not want to guess how much is still untranslated, and passed me to professor Janet Johnson, editor of the massive Demotic Dictionary, which the institute has been assembling for the last 40 years.
"Twenty years ago, I would have said that only 10 percent of all fragments have been read," she said. "But in the last generation, an inroad is being made on the backlog of unpublished things. Work on demotic is really moving forward."
While I had her on the phone, I asked: How's the dictionary coming?
"We're on the last three letters," she said. "We hope to be done in two years."
We'll check back then. Meanwhile, the first voicemail was no forgotten complaint from Barack Obama, as I had hoped, but a Canadian lawyer offering a speaking engagement. Eventually the voicemail was scrubbed clean, and offered words I took unexpected pleasure in hearing:
"You have no new messages and no . . . saved messages. Main menu."
So I phoned my office.
"Welcome to Avaya messaging," began the mechanical lady's voice. "You have . . . two new voice messages . . . one hundred, twenty-three, saved messages. Your mailbox is full. You will be unable to send messages. You may wish to delete unwanted messages. Main menu . . ."
I "may wish?" I do wish! Let's get at them!
First the two new messages — the anonymous angry guy who has been phoning at night for years (for a taste, click the video at the end of the column). He marks his messages "urgent" — the only caller to do so. Sometimes I delete his message right away, upon hearing that it is "urgent," pausing to savor the irony. Nothing signals a communication is meaningless as clearly as it being labeled "IMPORTANT! PLEASE READ."
Delete. God bless voicemail.
"Thank you brother Steinberg," a minister begins, citing a few minutes I took to speak to a young man under his care.
Onward, to the 123 saved messages, wondering what that first message will be. Like an archeologist with a toothbrush, working my way backward in time.
A retired cop; a Metra engineer; a man abused by a priest. The Taiwanese Economic and Cultural Office in Chicago. The Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City.
Delete delete delete. Most I saved for the phone numbers -- quicker than jotting them down.
A few dozen messages and we're back to the fall, and the election. A campaign manager. A senator's aide. The National Confectioners Association; the BBC; the Chicago Bears; a newspaper in Norway; the American Embassy in London.
The need to cull messages is a sign of our phone system's age. The e-mail pit, which once we were periodically hectored to dredge out, has apparently become bottomless, thanks to terabytes of storage. Or are we on to petabytes by now?
There are 32,765 e-mails lingering in my e-mail queue, and nobody seems to mind.
Back to voicemail. Some I kept as a record of the caller's remarks.
"The weapon was not registered, therefore it was illegal."
One was me, a nasal voice — cripe, I do sound like Woody Allen — caught without a notebook, calling my voicemail to read words from a plaque. A clever trick — if I say so myself — to have in your bag.
A surgeon. A public defender. Leon Varjian, the man who created the Pail & Shovel Party at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the late 1970s, phoning from New Jersey.
Once this stuff is kept forever, will anybody bother with it? Scarcity creates value, and electronic communications' overwhelming quantity, coupled with its hasty, artless construction, will probably keep anybody from ever caring. Nobody is going to write a thesis on "Tweets of the Early 21st Century."
Or will they?
We haven't even read the stuff we've got. Most Egyptian hieroglyphics unearthed by archeologists still haven't been read yet.
At least I think that's true. Better check.
"There are massive amounts of demotic papyri," said Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. ("Demotic" denotes the common form of ancient Egyptian writing; it relates to the familiar bird-and-eyeball hieroglyphics the same way shorthand relates to block printing).
"It's the biggest single corpus of written records, because they used this stuff as packing for mummies."
Stein did not want to guess how much is still untranslated, and passed me to professor Janet Johnson, editor of the massive Demotic Dictionary, which the institute has been assembling for the last 40 years.
"Twenty years ago, I would have said that only 10 percent of all fragments have been read," she said. "But in the last generation, an inroad is being made on the backlog of unpublished things. Work on demotic is really moving forward."
While I had her on the phone, I asked: How's the dictionary coming?
"We're on the last three letters," she said. "We hope to be done in two years."
We'll check back then. Meanwhile, the first voicemail was no forgotten complaint from Barack Obama, as I had hoped, but a Canadian lawyer offering a speaking engagement. Eventually the voicemail was scrubbed clean, and offered words I took unexpected pleasure in hearing:
"You have no new messages and no . . . saved messages. Main menu."
TODAY'S CHUCKLE
From Alicia Brandt:
The technological advance I wish I could get is an addition for my answering machine: a Get-to-the-Point button.
— Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 28, 2010
The technological advance I wish I could get is an addition for my answering machine: a Get-to-the-Point button.
— Originally published in the Sun-Times, April 28, 2010
I delete voicemail daily and there are at most half a dozen on a day. Emails are a different story. I have no idea how many are saved, or read but still in the que awaiting a decision to save to a file or delete. I do know my best friend died 14 years ago but I still have the last year of her emails. I can't quite get to "delete all" with those. Or the last emails from my sister, who died six years ago. But all the notifications of online purchases .. Amazon has its own folder .. could probably go. And the confirmations of bills paid. Maybe a good occupation for a Sunday afternoon.
ReplyDeleteOTOH, why bother? Those emails aren't taking up any actual space in your home. There's probably a better/more enjoyable use of your time. Take a nice walk this afternoon instead.
DeleteI just send emails I don't need to the trash and Gmail empties the oldest ones every 30 days. Not deleting things I believe adds to a certain amount of data centers being built. Not like AI but it has to be on a hard drive somewhere. Neil I also send myself texts or voicemails to remind me about things I need to research more or remember.
ReplyDeleteI still have an actual answering machine, but a few months ago I turned it off, because it was just getting filled up with scammers robocalls. When i do get home & look at the caller IDs, almost all are "Unavailable" numbers, from scammer's robocalls!
ReplyDeleteThe FCC Do Not Call list is a failure, what's needed is a law that puts anyone making scam calls a felony with one year in prison for each call made to be served consecutively!
As for the ones that come from overseas, send out CIA kill squads to eliminate them!
Yeah, the list is a farce. A law without teeth. I feel the same way about the hit squads. But scammers are as plentiful as weeds. You would need an enormous force to hunt them all down. They are worldwide. Mostly on other continents, where American laws don't apply. They're in Bangladesh, and the Philippines, and in Indonesia. Why do you think they have accented English, and difficulty speaking it? And Yankee hit squads would piss off too many third-world countries. We don't need any additional enemies right now.
DeleteIt's somewhat surprising that Felonious hasn't taken up the cause and waved the red flag and talked about eliminating scammers. That might have even gotten him a few more votes. But the truth is, he doesn't care about such things, because he's one of them. He's probably the scammiest scammer on this scam-filled planet.
Nice to see that classic black rotary phone, the likes of which a lot of us grew up with, atop the blog.
ReplyDelete"'No ma,' I said. I don't often phone myself at work, because when I do, I'm never there." LOL.
Years ago, long before the start of EGD, your office phone number was actually listed by the Sun-Times somewhere, and I called to tell you about some funny video about Cleveland that I'd seen. I was amazed that there was no intermediary, no switchboard or whatever, you just answered the phone and talked to me. I think you enjoyed the video, too!
We still have a landline (which ATT will be totally eliminating by 2027), an utterly pointless, somehow weirdly sentimental waste of money, with an answering machine. I don't have much trouble clearing out the daily handful of junk messages, most of which consist of simply "click."
I used to keep the email inbox empty, too, but for some reason I've recently allowed about 50 emails to accumulate that I hesitate to delete. (For instance, the past 7 weekly emails from "The New Yorker," that I like to think I'll at least skim at some point.)
"There are 32,765 e-mails lingering in my e-mail queue, and nobody seems to mind." Uh, that seems like a lot. 😉
Many decades ago now, we in the IT industry thought Optical Character Recognition was kind of neat because it let computers read printed material, which of course we take for granted now.
ReplyDeleteI had a bit of a chuckle at the comments about how they've improved the percentage of demotic items being read at last, presumably with scanning and computer involvement, but left unsaid, and perhaps not even predicted at that time, was how much further we have come even since 2010. I can look at a foreign text with the camera of my smartphone, and see it magically transform into English (or other selected language) right there on-screen. If there isn't an option for demotic text yet, I'm sure it will be there eventually.
As for email, I have active accounts on Hotmail and other providers, some going back more than 20 years... those written by me at a younger age... replies from friends and family long since deceased... I don't know what else to do with these messages except to not delete them. I'm grateful that we have so much more storage capability than we did in the past. We just need a way of sorting through it, or else it becomes the digital equivalent of a tub full of unsorted photos still in their drugstore processing envelopes, sitting forever in a closet.
I consider myself lucky that I do not have a customer-facing job and have no need to be 'reachable' by the masses. Both yesterday's blog post and today's remind me of how lucky I am.
ReplyDeleteI still like my landline and it isn't just used by scam callers.
ReplyDeleteI hope that dictionary is done by now, 15 years later!
ReplyDeleteAs best I can tell, it was finished in 2012, but they're still working on it. I will seek clarification.
Delete