Dan's Papers - May 29, 2009

"Yes, we expect to be over there sometime this afternoon. We'll - hello? Hello?"

Another dropped call.

But consider this - a black and white movie from the 1930s. Bette Davis is on the phone.

"Yes, we expect to be over there sometime this afternoon. We'll - hello? Hello?"

Of course, back then, it took an operator, summoned by pressing repeatedly on the receiver cradle, to fix the problem.

"Operator? We were cut off. Operator? Yes. Could you reconnect me to Alice, please?"

Did you know that in the old days, in the early days of television in the 1950s and 1960s, you fixed a TV with your fist?

If the picture started wobbling or rolling, you just got out of your chair and gave it a good clop on the side. All fixed.

Today, fixing a television involves calling the service department of your cable company. TVs are fine. They do not break. But the service can get interrupted. You get the announcement giving the options, and when you press one, often as not you get a message saying that the conversation could be recorded for training purposes and then you get told that all representatives are busy servicing other callers and that your call will be answered in the order that it was received. Finally, there is somebody in the Phillipines who walks you through how to fix your TV. No fists.

It was so satisfying hitting a TV with your fist. When I was a little boy, I watched my dad do it. After success, he would pump his fist in the air and give a cheer of victory.

He also would try whacking something under the hood of the car when that thing didn't work right. It would be a distributor. Or a starter motor. Or a water pump. With the car, the success rate doing this was about 20%. With the TV, success was about 90%. It was REALLY satisfying when smacking the car got it to start back up again.

This reminiscence came to mind the other day when we visited a surfer dude named Hal, now about 60, who lives in a shack out in some woods at the back of a remote beach called Barcelona Point in the Northwest section of East Hampton. He lives there with his wife, Linda, and dog, Max, and a no-name 20-year-old pickup truck and that's about it. He listens to the goings on in the outside world over an old transistor radio from the '50s. He has seen people with cell phones. He isn't interested in owning one. He travels to Sag Harbor for canned goods and batteries.

Hal certainly had never seen anything like my iPhone. I handed it to him.

"It's not just a cell phone," I told him. I showed him how you turned it on, how you got the news, stock quotes, your e-mail, your address book and so forth and so on. I showed him the GPS system and the road maps and how with a certain click you could even hold it up to the speaker of a radio and on the screen would appear the name of the song you were listening to and who was singing it.