You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
The Technological Tempest.
As I sit at my desk, I am being bombarded by dozens of emails from public information officers, dissatisfied consumers and angry Americans. The complaints range from pot holes to Obama to Diamond Lanes that police won’t patrol.
Emails fill my in box like so much dog poop on a New York City sidewalk.
I try and look at 5 page diatribes about injustice and the Department of Children’s Services and Food Stamps for dead people. I gaze at paragraph after paragraph of alarm and accusations.
How am I going to prove any of this, my mind races.
Each email wants my attention, beckons me to respond, asks me to spoon with it and caress it.
But I don’t have Woodward and Bernstein type of time to look into every story. I have to tackle the stories that I can turn, that I can handle by myself. This ain’t now Watergate.
I don’t have a staff of producers researching stories for me. I don’t have interns screening calls and fact checking and calling the mayor’s office to say “hey what do you think about this?”
There are not enough hours in a day for me to call most of these people back.
So many emails, so many words, so much information, so many facts to check and double check. It’s like white hot noise burning and blistering my brain at 8:15am.
I write, shoot, edit and report my own stories every day. I realize there are some juicy leads in the emails I get. Diamonds in the rough, perhaps a pulitzer shining in my inbox, hiding just under a layer of coal dust. But I don’t have time to weed through the wretched excess to find the rose that wants to bloom in my journalistic garden.
It’s all I can do every day just to crank out the televised sausage.
My day starts practically the moment I finish brushing my teeth.
My phone begins ringing or texts start chiming while I’m choosing my underwear.
Ideas start incubating while I’m tying my tie.
By the time I get in the car I’ve scanned through a bevy of emails and I start calling a plethora of sources.
I like consistency and I usually call the same cops in the same order. If I deviate they say “I was worried about you. You are late.”
We both laugh, but I know this part of my day is my bread and butter.
Many of you reading this know who you are and when you get called. If I have called you once, I have probably called you every single work day for 17 years. That’s a lot of Freaking beat checks.
So the other day I wake up and my iPhone is mysteriously dark.
It was working when I went to bed. When I wake up I have been visited by the technology gremlin.
I go to my text messages.
I see random phone numbers. One number after another number after another number. I begin scrolling down the list of contacts and the numbers roll on forever. It looks like my iPhone over night has tried to compute the square root of PI.
I don’t see any names. I don’t see any cops, or lawyers, or hospital officials. I see numbers and numbers and more numbers. I’m suddenly Russel Crowe in a perfect mind.
“OH NO!!!!” I cry to an empty house.
WTF?
I’ve been collecting these digits for 17 years. Some of these numbers I’ve had forever. Some numbers have taken me 17 years to acquire.
I turn the phone off. I turn the phone on. Wax On. Wax Off. It’s the electronic equivalent of Mr. Miyagi.
Unlike the Karate Kid, I get no trophy, win no black belt.
I have more numbers on my little screen than Albert Einstein had in his theory of relativity.
I call the iPhone store and the lady is dumber than dirt. “Uh I don’t know, we’ve had a few calls like this before,” she says in a non committal, completely unhelpful way.
Then I feel dumber than dirt.
“Did you back up your account in the icloud?” she asks.
I swallow hard. “The I-what?”
Jeezus H Christ. Technology is a pain in the ass. The more it liberates us, the more it enslaves us.
The icloud? Apparently it is a storage place in cyber space and I should be sending back up information there.
I’m old. Someone needs to hold my hand on projects like this. I need a boy scout to walk me across the technology street to make sure I get safely to the other side.
“Ah, no I didn’t back up my data on the iphone,” I say sheepishly.
“Well then I think you have a problem,” she says.
It’s Sunday. I just want a cup of coffee and a danish.
Suddenly my Sunday has become a binary rescue mission. I am suddenly a Coast Guard diver about ready to launch out of a chopper into the icy waters of numerical malfunction.
I exhale and compose myself. If I let my anger boil, the tips of my eyes will melt. I try and address this dilemna rationally, calmly.
Like an iphone MacGiver, I go to the first text message.
It’s listed as phone number 123-4567.
It says in no particular order:
“I got nothing”
“Nada”
“Zero”
“Zilch”
Crap, I think to myself, I don’t know who that is.
I pause for a moment. Zilch? Who says Zilch all the time?
Hey that’s Tommy.
And with that I load Tommy’s name into the phone number given for that nondescript text.
And so it goes for the next five hours.
Phone number 987-6543 says.
“I’ll get you the affidavit, but you didn’t get it from me?”
I say “can I get the 911 tape?”
“No. it’s part of the investigative file,” the source says.
I think for a moment. I remember that story. That’s Joe Blow.
And with that, I assign Joe Blow’s name to phone number 987-6543.
It would have been easier to count and classify grains of rice in a box of Uncle Ben’s.
My God was this task tedious. I was a data storage sniper, banging out anonymous text messages, one after another after another.
Some texts are as enigmatic as the shroud of Turin. I simply throw those in the numerical scrap heap. Some sources are so esoteric, I had no idea who they were.
There were many numerical casualties in this endeavor, trust me.
Sadly, I was never 100 percent sure that the contact I assigned to any phone number was actually that person.
What a muddled mess.
I imagine texting officer Joe asking about the guy’s bloody stump and then having some 80 year old lady text me back “what you talking about whipper snapper?”
For me, my phone numbers are gold. These are my money makers. Information is what leads to stories. Without the morning cup of Cordan, lots of these cops forget to call me. If they forget to call me, then I don’t hear about the young mom who was attacked by the bandit. I don’t hear how she jumped on his car holding on for dear life while the thief did donuts in the parking lot trying to throw her off.
If I don’t have this exclusive story, then what good am I? I’m like the rest of the pedestrian ooze waiting for a press release in between sips of coffee.
My phone stealing my contacts is akin to felonious assault. To me it’s like a burglar breaking into my bank and stealing my money.
My iphone is lucky I didn’t Agg Assault it’s skinny aluminium ass.
I would estimate I get about 75% of the numbers back.
“What happened?” everyone asks.
“Super Moon,” I respond. “I really have no F-in idea.”
Why does your phone wake up from a night of slumber and suddenly blow out every contact name it ever knew. And why blow out the names and keep all the phone numbers.
I dare you to even remember your own phone number no less know the number of your mom, your dad, your kids. Now try some obscure cop working over nights in East Nashville.
Yeah, good luck.
So I found an app that my iPhone and Verizon seem to like. It’s a weird Ménage à trois of information. It supposedly will remind me to save my data once a week. Will I ever need it? Who knows. Technology is a ball buster, a real tempest in the iphone if you will.
life’s crazy™