I'm a Stranger Here Myself (5 page)

I came across something in our bathroom the other day that has occupied my thoughts off and on ever since. It was a little dispenser of dental floss.

It isn’t the floss itself that is of interest to me but that the container has a toll-free number printed on it. You can call the company’s Floss Hotline twenty-four hours a day. But here is the question: Why would you need to? I keep imagining some guy calling up and saying in an anxious voice, “OK, I’ve got the floss. Now what?”

As a rule of thumb, I would submit that if you need to call your floss provider, for any reason, you are probably not ready for this level of oral hygiene.

My curiosity aroused, I had a look through all our cup-boards and discovered with interest that nearly all household products these days carry a hotline number. You can, it appears, call up for guidance on how to use soap and shampoo, gain helpful tips on where to store ice cream so that it doesn’t melt and run out of the bottom of the container, and receive professional advice on parts of your body to which you can most successfully and stylishly apply nail polish. (“So let me get this straight. You’re saying
not
on my forehead?”)

For those who do not have access to a telephone, or who perhaps have a telephone but have not yet mastered its use, most products also carry helpful printed tips such as “Remove Shells Before Eating” (on peanuts) and “Caution: Do Not Re-Use as Beverage Container” (on a bleach bottle). We recently bought an electric iron that admonished us, among other things, not to use it in conjunction with explosive materials. In a broadly similar vein, I read a couple of weeks ago that computer software companies are considering rewriting the instruction “Strike Any Key When Ready” because so many people have been calling in to say they cannot find the “Any” key.

Until a few days ago, my instinct would have been to chortle richly at people who need this sort of elemental guidance, but then three things happened that made me modify my views.

First, I read in the paper how John Smoltz, the Atlanta Braves star, showed up at a training session one day with a painful-looking welt across his chest and, when pressed for an explanation, sheepishly admitted that he had tried to iron a shirt while he was wearing it.

Second, it occurred to me that although I have never done anything quite so foolish as that, it was only because I had not thought of it.

Third, and perhaps most conclusively, two nights ago I went out to run two small errands—specifically, to buy some pipe tobacco and mail some letters. I bought the tobacco, carried it straight across the street to a mailbox, opened the lid, and deposited it. I won’t tell you how far I walked before it dawned on me that this was not a 100 percent correct execution of my original plans.

You see my problem. People who need labels on mail-boxes saying “Not for Deposit of Tobacco or Other Personal Items” can’t very well smirk at others, even those who iron their chests or have to seek lathering guidance from a shampoo hotline.

I mentioned all this at dinner the other night and was appalled to see the enthusiasm and alacrity with which all the members of the family began suggesting labels that would be particularly suitable for me, like “Caution: When Door Says ‘Pull’ It’s Absolutely No Use Pushing” and “Warning: Do Not Attempt to Remove Sweater Over Head While Walking Among Chairs and Tables.” A particular favorite was “Caution: Ensure That Shirt Buttons Are in Correct Holes Before Leaving House.” This went on for some hours.

I concede that I am somewhat inept with regard to memory, personal grooming, walking through low doorways, and much else, but the thing is, it’s my genes. Allow me to explain.

I recently tore out of the newspaper an article concerning a study at the University of Michigan, or perhaps it was the University of Minnesota (at any rate it was somewhere cold starting with “M”), that found that absentmindedness is a genetically inherited trait. I put it in a file marked “Absentmindedness” and, of course, mislaid the file.

However, in searching for it this morning I found another file intriguingly marked “Genes and So On,” which is just as interesting and—here was the lucky part—not altogether irrelevant. In it I found a copy of a report from the November 29, 1996, issue of the journal
Science
entitled “Association of Anxiety-Related Traits with a Polymorphism in the Serotonin Transporter Gene Regulatory Region. ”

Now to be perfectly candid, I don’t follow polymorphism in serotonin transporters as closely as I ought, at least not during the basketball season, but when I saw the sentence “By regulating the magnitude and duration of serotonergic responses, the 5-HT transporter (5-HTT) is central to the fine-tuning of brain serotonergic neurotransmission,” I thought, as almost anyone would, “Gosh, these fellows may be on to something.”

The upshot of the study is that scientists have located a gene (specifically, gene number SLC6A4 on chromosome 17q12, in case you want to experiment at home) that determines whether you are a born worrier or not. To be absolutely precise, if you have a long version of the SLC6A4 gene, you are very probably easygoing and serene, whereas if you have the short version you can’t leave home without saying at some point, “Stop the car. I think I left the bathwater running.”

What this means in practice is that if you are not a born worrier you have nothing to worry about (though of course you wouldn’t be worrying anyway), whereas if you
are
a worrier by nature there is absolutely nothing you can do about it, so you may as well stop worrying, except of course you can’t. Now put this together with the aforementioned findings about absentmindedness at the University of Somewhere Cold, and I think you can see that our genes have a great deal to answer for.

Here’s another interesting fact from my “Genes and So On” file. According to Richard Dawkins in
The Blind Watchmaker,
each one of the ten trillion cells in the human body contains more genetic information than the entire
Encyclopaedia Britannica
(and without sending a salesman to your door), yet it appears that 90 percent of all our genetic material doesn’t do anything at all. It just sits there, like Uncle Fred and Aunt Mabel when they drop by on a Sunday.

From this I believe we can draw four important conclusions, namely: (1) Even though your genes don’t do much, they can let you down in a lot of embarrassing ways; (2) always mail your letters first, then buy the tobacco; (3) never promise a list of four things if you can’t remember the fourth one; and (4).

I have a teenage son who is a runner. He has, at a conservative estimate, sixty-one hundred pairs of running shoes, and every one of them represents a greater investment of cumulative design effort than, say, the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. These shoes are amazing. I was just reading a review in one of his running magazines of the latest in “Sport Utility Sneakers,” as they are evidently called, and it was full of passages like this: “A dual density EVA midsole with air units fore and aft provides stability while a gel heel-insert absorbs shock, but the shoe makes a narrow footprint, a characteristic that typically suits only the biomechanically efficient runner.” Alan Shepard went into space with less science at his disposal than that.

So here is my question. If my son can have his choice of a seemingly limitless range of scrupulously engineered, biomechanically efficient footwear, why does my computer keyboard suck? This is a serious inquiry.

My computer keyboard has 102 keys, almost double what my old manual typewriter had, which on the face of it seems awfully generous. Among other typographical luxuries, I can choose between three styles of bracket and two kinds of colon. I can dress my text with carets (ˆ) and cedillas (˜). I can have slashes that fall to the left or to the right, and goodness knows what else.

I have so many keys, in fact, that over on the right-hand side of the keyboard there are whole communities of buttons of whose function I haven’t the tiniest inkling. Occasionally I hit one by accident and subsequently discover that several paragraphs of my w9rk n+w look l*         ke th?s, or that I have written the last page and a half in an interesting but unfortunately nonalphabetic font called Wingdings, but otherwise I haven’t the faintest idea what those buttons are there for.

Never mind that many of these keys duplicate the functions of other keys, while others apparently do nothing at all (my favorite in this respect is one marked “Pause,” which when pressed does absolutely nothing, raising the interesting metaphysical question of whether it is therefore doing its job), or that several keys are arrayed in slightly imbecilic places. The delete key, for instance, is right beside the overprint key so that often I discover, with a trill of gay laughter, that my most recent thoughts have been devouring, PacMan-like, everything I had previously written. Quite often, I somehow hit a combination of keys that summons a box that says, in effect, “This Is a Pointless Box. Do You Want It?” which is followed by another that says “Are You
Sure
You Don’t Want the Pointless Box?” Never mind all that. I have known for a long time that the computer is not my friend.

But here is what gets me. Out of all the 102 keys at my disposal, there is no key for the fraction 1/2. Typewriter keyboards always used to have a key for 1/2. Now, however, if I wish to write 1/2, I have to bring down the font menu and call up a directory called “WP Characters,” then hunt through a number of subdirectories until I remember, or more often blunder on, the particular one, “Typographic Symbols,” in which hides the furtive 1/2 sign. This is irksome and pointless, and it doesn’t seem right to me.

But then most things in the world don’t seem right to me. On the dashboard of our family car is a shallow indentation about the size of a paperback book. If you are looking for somewhere to put your sunglasses or spare change, it is the obvious place, and it works extremely well, I must say, so long as the car is not actually moving. However, as soon as you put the car in motion, and particularly when you touch the brakes, turn a corner, or go up a gentle slope, everything slides off. There is, you see, no lip around this dashboard tray. It is just a flat space with a dimpled bottom. It can hold nothing that has not been nailed to it.

So I ask you: What then is it
for
? Somebody had to design it. It didn’t just appear spontaneously. Some person—perhaps, for all I know, a whole committee of people in the Dashboard Stowage Division—had to invest time and thought in incorporating into the design of this vehicle (it’s a Dodge Excreta, if you’re wondering) a storage tray that will actually hold nothing. That is really quite an achievement.

But it is nothing, of course, compared with the manifold design achievements of those responsible for the modern video recorder. Now I am not going to prattle on about how impossible it is to program the typical VCR because you know that already. Nor will I observe how irritating it is that you must cross the room and get down on your stomach to confirm that it is actually recording. But I will just make one small passing observation. I recently bought a VCR, and one of the selling points—one of the things the manufacturer boasted about—was that it was capable of recording programs up to twelve months in advance. Now think about this for a moment and tell me any circumstance—and I mean any circumstance at all—in which you can envision wanting to set a video machine to record a program one year from now.

I don’t want to sound like some old guy who is always moaning. I freely acknowledge that there are many excellent, well-engineered products that didn’t exist when I was a boy— the pocket calculator and Post-it notes are two that fill me yet with gratitude and wonder—but it does seem to me that an awful lot of things out there have been designed by people who cannot possibly have stopped to think how they will be used.

Just think for a moment of all the everyday items you have to puzzle over—fax machines, scanners, photocopiers, hotel showers, hotel alarm clocks, airline tickets, television remote control units, microwave ovens, almost any electrical product owned by someone other than you—because they are ill thought out.

And why are they so ill thought out? Because all the best designers are making running shoes. Either that or they are just idiots. In either case, it really isn’t fair.