WHAT'S IT TRYING TO SAY?

As I remember it, electrical devices used to just do a particular job and that was it. You turned a switch and the lamp came on. You put bread in the toaster, pushed down the lever, and either toast or charcoal popped up. Then they started putting things like pilot lights on appliances so you knew when they were on. That was the beginning of electrical devices trying to communicate with us. Now it is much more complicated.

Take my VCR for example. (A VCR is what us old-folks used before the DVD was invented. And DVD is what we used before Blue-ray.) My VCR has a red light to tell me when it is plugged in, but not turned on. When it is turned on , the light changes to green. Pretty nifty. It also has a bunch of other little lights that tell you things. Unfortunately it has a little red circle with what looks like an L in it that has been flashing on and off for months. It's trying to say something, but I don't comprehend. I don't know what it wants. I suppose I could get the instruction manual and look up what this means, but that seems like having to find a dictionary to translate someone else's language.

This electronic communication stuff started with the computer chips they put into things. Now the computers themselves are constantly communicating one thing or another. My computer beeps, bings, boops, squawks, and occasionally plays an entire symphony (all right not an entire symphony, just a movement or two) when it wants something. The strangest thing is that it laughs when it turns off. I'm not making this up. It says ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! It's more like a giggle actually. Sometimes my computer has whole messages for me. Every once in a while when it starts it says it can't find the somethingorother.dll file. I don't know what that is or what it does because everything works the same whether it can find it or not. Of course there are also the dreaded blue-screen messages. The screen goes black, then this blue screen pops up with writing about some sort of fatal error and then something about kernel gobbledygook-hasenpfeffer-18fvn38gfui. Then it quits working. Maybe it just wants a rest. So why doesn't it say so?

These computers aren't as clever as they think they are. Case in point. Our church organ has developed some sort of problem. Sometimes when it is turned on, it plays a random note, I mean a really random note. It doesn't match any note on the keyboard. Or sometimes it makes a wha-wha-wha sound. Or sometimes it goes "click" and then works fine. We called in the organ fix-it man to repair it. After half an hour taking parts out and putting them back in, the organ stopped it's shenanigans. The repair man isn't sure that the organ is fixed because he doesn't know what was wrong, jut that it stopped. The repair man explained that the organ as a CPU in it just like a computer. As a mater of fact, it's the same CPU that IBM used in desktop computers before it started using the ones in the PC, 8806 or something. Now if the organ has a computer in it, why can't it tell us what's wrong? My car has a computer gizmo in it that tells you all sorts of stuff when it goes wrong, so why can't the organ do it. In the old days of pipe organs, I could look at the parts and see what was wrong, but not these jumped up boxes of computer chips. So why aren't they more helpful? I think they are keeping secrets from us.

Now comes the spooky part–the mysterious microwave in the church kitchen. Someone donated the microwave to the church, but they didn't have the instruction book. I am not intimidated by these things (not usually), so I just pushed buttons until I figured out how it worked. I have shown numerous people what to do–press cycle 1, then time, then enter the minutes and seconds, then start–but every time someone want to use it, they have to call me over to work the buttons. Mostly I use the microwave to heat frozen dinners on the days when I have evening meetings, or I use it to reheat my cup of tea. I can make a cup of tea in the morning, and have to reheat it four or five times because I never get to drink more than a sip before the phone rings or someone comes into the office. A few times the same cup of tea has lasted two days. Anyway, today I was about to reheat a cup of jasmine tea, when I saw that the panel which displays the minutes and second had the word "yes" on it. It was strange lettering because it used the same LED's that the numbers use so it read something like this:





Yes what? What was it saying? Yes, I'm working? Yes, I'll warm your tea? Yes, I'll bombard you with electro-magnetic waves? As soon as I touched the cycle button, the yes disappeared. After I had reheated the tea, I experimented to find out how the yes had come to display itself. I discovered that if you press the button that says "memory," yes is displayed. If you then touch anything else, it disappears. So "yes " is somehow fixed in its memory, but I still don't know why. What is it remembering that it says yes to? Has it been having a fling with the electric coffee maker? Yes! Yes! Yes! Or is it communicating with some alien computer in a UFO? Yes, I will exterminate the humanoid life-forms. Things like this bother me.

I suppose I'll just have to put up with electronic devices communicating in their peculiar fashion, but I think we need to be careful. These things may start to take over our lives. When we become their labor saving devices, don't say I didn't warn you.

May the Lord God bless you on your way and greet you on your arrival.

Wayne