Modern times ...

Sometimes the modern world confounds me. What now? The internet connection at our downtown Little Rock condo quit working after a spell of bad weather. I know what the problem is. It’s happened twice before. There’s a remote box about two blocks from our building that has something to do with our service. For some reason, a wire gets tangled and has to be restored.

Back in the 70s, when I got married, all you would have had to do was call a number that clearly identified the company responsible. A nice operator, who was only few blocks away, probably, would have cheerfully set an appointment with a repair man. Yes, a “man.” Women didn’t evolve far enough to repair electronics until much later. Everyone knows that.

Anyway, the technician would have arrived at appointed time, fixed the problem, and the Internet would have been restored. Well, not the Internet, but the Princess phone, the state-of-the art in home communications at that time. Ours, the phone, was white, a compromise. Don’t ask.

Fast forward. Let’s look at the one-page manual they left with the router. Oh, no problem. Here’s a web site to go to if your Internet quits working. I’ve foiled this ruse, though. Sometime in the past, I filched a phone number from an unsuspecting technician. All I have to do is call India and get this process started. I’ll talk to a nice woman or man who learned English easily with the aid of Rosetta Stone software, the professional version. They will speak quickly with a soft, low voice at the same volume as the phone's background noise, so as not to alarm or insult senior citizens. They will assure me that the problem is the router and they will send me a new one. That will only take a week and a trip to UPS to return the perfectly good one, but hell, I’ll have a new router.

Another three-hour conversation will finally convince the next technician that the problem was not the router but some mysterious and wicked Karma that only a qualified technician can thwart.

Now, we’re getting somewhere. Mysteriously, the contact assigns me an appointment with the tech person. Routing the appointment process from Little Rock to India and back saves someone some time and money, but not me. Anyway, a specific time is set for “Operation Fix-a-Wire.” He will arrive precisely between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. Should she or he inform me of his impending arrival by phone or Internet?

I’ll say I think the phone might be better.

Wait, wait, it’s not over. The tech will refuse to accept my diagnosis until a two-hour battle with an antique contact board has ended in total defeat. Finally, finally, she or he will motor the two blocks over and fix the wire.

Halleluiah!

I’d sure miss the cute puppy pictures and the personal insults and hatred, but sometimes I think I might be happier without so many modern conveniences.

My Redacted Life: Chapter Eleven (Cont._4)

As I continued in the urban planning profession in 1971, I and my colleagues were standing on the shoulders of some giants in the field. They consisted of a small group of dedicated professionals based out of the University of Arkansas. I never knew them all, but they included Bob Middleton, Phil Simon, and Jim Vizzier among others.

These men covered the entire state from Fayetteville, in pre-interstate Arkansas. They organized planning commissions and prepared plans, along with supporting regulations for cities, mostly the smaller ones. They traveled pretty much at their own expense. Bob Middleton’s son Rob, who became an urban planner himself, would later tell of how his dad would leave Fayetteville at four in the morning, drive to Smackover, Arkansas to work and perhaps attend a planning commission that evening and drive back. Meals consisted of perhaps a jar of peanuts consumed along the way.

Phil Simon claimed later, of driving from Fayetteville to Osceola across the state and back, a trip that included a ferry crossing at Norfork, to attend a planning commission meeting. They were tough men who must have truly loved what they were doing.

A man originally from the rural side of planning, Bill Bonner headed up the group. Later, the professional planners of the state would establish a “Bill Bonner Award,” given to those in the state who exhibited extraordinary devotion to the profession.

I didn’t know much about this group when I began my career. Some of the projects on which I worked involved updates of their modest efforts. Superciliousness posed a serious temptation in those days. We had the capacity of producing maps in color and a state of the art IBM Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter that could store data and allow the changing of font types. Would there ever be more advanced word-processing devices than that?

Our capabilities certainly made the old-fashioned looking products from Fayetteville look amateurish.

As time went by though, I found myself appreciating the professionalism that the group from my Alma Mater imparted under such trying circumstances with limited budgets. I also came to appreciate the impetus behind their efforts. It flowed from a country and state that believed in confronting and addressing urban problems. Our Leaders were brash enough even to believe that we possessed the wherewithal to solve those problems.

The world was changing, and the country would not permit the decay and death of communities bypassed by modern history, as well as the Interstate Highway System. At least we thought so then.

That was in an America that can seem as having existed a long time ago in a place far, far away.

The ultimate and then some