Sometimes my job requires me to receive documents via email, in PDF format. The last time this happened, instead of a nice 70-page PDF, I received an extremely long email made up of a mass of English letters all crammed together in no coherent order. A very competent human being in IT fixed it in a matter of minutes. To my question as to what had caused the problem—was it something I did?—she answered: “No, sometimes they just do that.”
A wave of nostalgia washed over me, took me back to the distant past, when I was tending toddlers. Take the kid to quality activities, feed it healthy food, protect it from junk food and TV, read to it, provide it with gender-neutral, non-violent toys, volunteer at the pre-school … and then at some wildly unpredictable moment, for no logical reason, in the worst possible place—usually in the checkout line—it throws itself screaming onto its stomach. The sippy cup clatters to the floor; its plastic top ricochets across the tiles, and there’s a splashing noise and a sudden sticky wetness down the side of your jeans. Through the din, there comes from behind a shuffling sound, a polite cough and the subtle aroma of freshly-laundered clothing; without turning around you know what is there: the perfect mom, calm, posh and functional all wrapped up in one, with a barely detectable admixture of judgmental. Dangling its chubby feet through the leg-holes in her cart, on its seat above the neat pile of fresh fruit and vegetables, sits the perfect child, clean, happy, polite, adorable, patient. The 100 percent organic all-fruit sorbet in her cart is going to melt, I think. As I fight the impulse to just cave in and buy the damn gummy bears, I think, trying to persuade myself: yes, sometimes they just do that.
The internet is like your toddler. Love it, play with it, share it with others, watch it grow. But don’t trash your backup plan. Last week, Duke employees were given the opportunity to enroll in benefits for 2014. The process entails logging on to a website and clicking on little circles before each benefit, with the goal of producing a black dot at the center of each circle. When I tried to do this, the dots appeared instantaneously each time, then just as instantaneously vanished. Looked like no benefits in 2014. So I called HR. Astoundingly, a human being answered the phone and was kind enough to enroll me, manually. I asked him what the problem had been—what had I done wrong? He answered, as I knew he would: “The system has been doing that.”
This fall, high school seniors attempting to submit Early Decision applications using the Common Application discovered that the text box was eating their essays. The last I heard, the deadline had to be moved back for tens of thousands of college applicants. If the next new crop of Dukies has a traumatized, dazed look about them, my guess is that this could be the cause. So now do we need to talk about the Affordable Care Act’s online technology snafu? Not really. We can leap straight ahead to the solution. With local pride I note a recent News and Observer report that North Carolina experts on the sign-up procedures for health insurance have come up with “a creative way to bypass digital technology: paper, pen and envelope.” As someone who spends a lot of times with books—the paper kind—I endorse this solution to this and many other life problems. If they don’t LET you log on, then how can they MAKE you? Grab a cup of coffee, a chocolate bar, and, say, a copy of “Uncle Vanya.” Curl up in a corner and read until everything settles down, until they work out their issues, and you can coast in, log on and take care of whatever it is you need to get done. Remember, if you’re late doing it, it is THEIR fault.
Earlier this semester we reported the true story of the rat that shut down the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant. Vermin sabotage is a worldwide trend. A few weeks ago, a gigantic swarm of jellyfish washed into the cooling water intake pipes at the Oskarshamn nuclear power plant in Sweden, shutting down one of its units. The scientific term for this apparently common occurrence is “jellyfish clogs.” The theme of this column has been the power of individual units of biology, from rodents to the crown of creation—homo sapiens—over the tools and systems we create. This can be a creative force or a destructive one. As Duke wheels into the homestretch in the race to put our courses online, it may be worth remembering the small but mighty human being—Tolstoy, say—in the background, listening, writing, thinking, always ready to help.
Carol Apollonio is a professor of the practice in Slavic and Eurasian studies. Her column runs every other Tuesday. Send Professor Apollonio a message on Twitter @flath3.
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