BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

123-4567?

987-6543?

566-3714?

I’ll be honest… I actually had some trouble deciding what title to use for this blog entry. (By the way – it will become apparent in about 4.33632 seconds that this entry is NOT about Jenny by Tommy Tutone…)

Other possible titles were:

1. “Been There, Done That…”
2. “Neener, Neener, We Were Here First…”
3. “She’s Got Legs…”
4. “160? Is That All I Get?”
5. “Blackberry? Isn’t That A Kind Of Cobbler?”

Of course, #3 was my personal favorite, but I suspect that was pretty obvious. As to how any of these potential titles fit in with 867-5309, or even how 867-5309 fits in with this blog entry for that matter…well, read on and I’m betting it will make sense at some point…

Of course, you know me. The “when” it will make sense might be a long time coming – reading-wise, that is – so, you might want to hit the restroom, refill your coffee, then get comfortable. Don’t worry, I’ll wait…

(do do, do Doo, do da, DOOOOO… do do, do Doo, DOOOP, Do doodle doodle, do do, do da, Doo, do do, DOOOOO, DOOP, Do doodle doodle DOOP, Do doooooo….) [give me a break… have you ever tried to convert the Jeopardy theme music to text? It ain’t easy, let me tell ya’…]

Okay, so everyone back? Got your drinks? Settled in? Good…

So… Since we are on the subject of converting things to text, I had occasion to spend a bit of time text messaging the other day. Now, I realize that a whole raft of you are adopting your best sarcastic voice and saying, “Yeah, good on ya’, Sellars. So you texted… You want a medal or something?”

Well… not a medal per se… How about if I put it into perspective.  You see, E K and I have cell phones… (Okay, okay, bite your tongues for a second here, I realize that’s not a big deal or anything)… The truth is, I have had a “mobile phone” since they were bigger than a breadbox and stayed permanently attached to your car. It was one of those technician things… Then, years later I upgraded to a bag phone – anyone remember those? Same as the car phone, but they stuffed all the crap into a glorified purse so you could drag it around with you. As an aside, I never did have one of the “pocket bricks” that were the size of a loaf of bread and qualified as the original “Cell Phone”… I just waited until cells were the size of double Whopper™ so that I wouldn’t have to wear a back brace while carrying it. (I’d already done enough of that lugging around the bag phone)… Of course, these days cell phones are only about a half inch shy of being the same thing as the communicator on Star Trek: The Next Generation… Just slap your chest and talk away… But, we aren’t there just yet.

Still, what started out as a somewhat flawed communications device attached to my car with a curly-q antenna has now morphed into this little flip open gizmo thingy about the size of a pack of cigarettes – actually, a little bit smaller I guess – that has eleventy-buh-jillion ring tones, takes pictures, surfs the web, acts like a PDA, and generally makes my life miserable…  And, of course, that is only because I am not packing around the latest and greatest innovation in personal communication such as a “chocolate covered blackberry moto razor iSomething-or-another”. Neither is E K. If we were, then we could probably fly the space shuttle remotely while listening to 47 gigabytes of MP3’s on top of all that stuff…

Now, I realize that may seem a bit odd – us not having the latest and greatest I mean – what with us both being techie types, even though I’ve retired from that segment of my life – well… in a professional sense, anyway… I still keep my finger in just in case I have to fall back on something… But, there goes that chicken again.

The point is, E K uses her cell primarily for work and emergencies. I use mine primarily for being able to call my girls – E K and the munchkin, obviously – when I am on the road touring and for emergencies. So, what does that mean? Well, pretty much it just means that we have a fairly basic calling plan. Ex-tee-ump minutes per month and that’s pretty much the extent of it. Therefore, we don’t “text” like most folks out there. For one, it costs us money. For two, well, we figure you call, say what you have to say, and there you go.

Now, it’s true that sometimes being able to send the equivalent of an “email” or “instant message” is an attractive option. I am more than willing to admit that fact. Perhaps the person you are trying to contact is in the middle of something and all you need to do is deliver a quick, “gonna be late for dinner” or something like that. So, I can see the allure. But, it’s just not something E K and I have ever really done…

So, here we are back around to the fact that I did do some texting the other day… No, I’m still not asking for a medal, but I think maybe you can see where this is kinda like getting your grandmother to try chicken tikka masala for the first time. It was a big deal for me to do this… Old dog, new trick… yadda yadda…

Anyway, I suspect by now you are figuring that something obviously had to  exert some manner of influence upon me in order to force a situation where this whole texting thing would happen. Well, you’re correct. As it happens it was the FBI.

(Waiting patiently for the surprised gasps to settle…)

Okay… not to worry. It wasn’t the FBI as in the whole Federal Bureau of Investigation or me being in some kind of trouble (at least, not that they’ve told me about). It was a friend who works for the FBI. He was in town on business, but had some free time and wanted to hook up for lunch and to catch up, etc… As it happens, he texts quite a bit, so that is how he contacted me. And, me not knowing if he was in the middle of a meeting or some such, found it necessary to “answer” him by texting back instead of just calling.

Well, as you might guess, this presented a bit of an obstacle for me… As we’ve already established, I don’t text. Never really have…  So I had no idea where to start. Still, I spent 25+ years as a computer tech, so it shouldn’t be all that hard to figure out.

Following the prompts I pressed the button to reply and it gave me a blank little screen that awaited my message. At this point in one of those flash back-flash forward moments I found myself wanting to pull a “Scotty” from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and just start talking to the damn thing. (Hmmmm… Nostalgia moment… I’m pretty sure I took E K to see that movie at the Northwest Plaza cinema back in ’86 shortly after we moved in together… I know, ignore the chicken, Sellars! Ignore the chicken!) Well, obviously I knew better than to babble at it, so I started poking around on the keys to make letters appear. After spending what was, I am absolutely certain, way too long to create a simple text message I succeeded in getting it sent. At this point, I was fairly proud of myself.

Seconds later, however, I was faced with receiving his reply, which in turn, deserved a reply… A bit longer reply.

Of course, I only had 160 characters. Well, that’s how it works on MY phone, at least… For all I know the rest of you texters out there can read this entire blog entry on your phone. (As an aside, are at least a couple of those potential titles starting to make sense yet?)

So, can you see where this is heading? Yeah, I know… The thing is, I didn’t want to do it, but I had no choice. Yes. I had to instantly teach myself a second language… Text Speak. I proceeded to reply with all of the necessary information required, however, I taught myself how to misspell things on the fly. I left out vowels, I replaced entire syllables with numeric values, I abbreviated, truncated, masticated, ameliorated, integrated, intimated, and generally adulterated the written word, all for the purpose of getting my point across in as few a characters and as quickly as possible. (the quickly part has to do with a whole ‘nother issue better left unblogged.)

Well, I don’t mind telling you, it was painful.

Really. I kept wanting to go back and fix the spelling errors and the like because the message looked like a teenage girl was sending a giggle-gram to her BFF (yeah, it seriously scares me that I know what a BFF is… I blame those cell phone commercials)…

But, I couldn’t… Fix the errors, that is… For one, I only had 160 characters to work with. For two, I would have been typing all day, being the inexperienced texter that I am. And, for three, I have no idea how they charge for these text messages, but I was already racking up enough of a bill as it was. If it was by the character, I would have been in deep crap…

I know… Right now you are saying to yourself, “Okay, Sellars… This little diatribe pretty much explains the “160” title and even the “Blackberry” title… But, what the hell does it have to do with the other three? Especially the one about legs?”

Glad you asked.

It was after I had labored over sending this series of text messages back and forth with my friend that something dawned on me. Kids today have this whole texting thing pretty damn easy… And, I mean besides the obvious part. You see, it was in that moment I realized I had been here, done this, worn a hole in the T-Shirt, long before the bulk of the “text generation” was even a glimmer in parental eyes.

You see, way back in the day, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and all that jazz – yeah, way back in the 80’s, we technicians carried numeric pagers. (before that we carried “beepers” that simply alerted us to call an answering service, but there goes a chicken again…) Numeric pagers were a marvel to us – yeah, I know, they even have text pagers these days. E K still carries on of those too… But, back to the numerics… They were a marvel to us because we could dial a number and punch in a number to call, so that the person being paged knew who to call instead of that extra step of calling the service, then calling the number, etc, etc… Remember, back then we didn’t have cell phones, we had to stop and find a payphone.

Okay… So we sent numbers to pagers… B F D… What does that have to do with anything? Well, being the industrious little geeks we were, we started figuring out little shortcuts. Anyone here ever watch Millennium? (that Megan Gallagher… man, I tell you…) My example here is that the main character, Frank Black, would get a simple page – “2000”. That was all it took and he would know the number to call. Well, us geeky types way back when were doing that sort of secret code paging even before Millennium came along…

It started simply enough – numeric codes established by service departments that would mean something to the tech receiving the page. Stuff like:

911 – Call the shop immediately

XXX-XXXX99 – (phone number appended with 99) Call this number ASAP.

XXX-XXXX – (just a phone number) Call this number, moderate priority.

XXX-XXXX00 – (phone number appended with 00) Call this number, low priority.

Of course, anything that starts out simply will eventually end up with layers of complexity that overwhelm the innate simpleness. Especially when electronics geeks are involved. Before long, more numbers were being added on to mean other things – almost like police call codes.

Then, it got really scary.

Anyone here remember that old joke you do with a calculator? The one where you tell a story while punching in a calculation for each element of the tale, and at the end you hit the = sign and have the punchline, which  is 71011345? or 55378008? (for those of you too young to remember this geekdom moment, if you turned the calculator upside down and looked at the display, the digital LED would be spelling out SHELL OIL or BOOB LESS… (it’s far more obvious with 7 segment LED’s than this particular font…)

So, did we spend the day saying SHELL OIL to one another, or calling each other BOOB LESS? Well, not really. There are actually a very limited number of things you can spell with inverted seven segment lettering, but we did manage to come up with a few initials that meant something.

And, what does this have to do with legs?

I knew you were going to ask that… Back when E K and I were dating, as well as during our cohabitation and early years of our marriage, there were times when I just wanted to let her know I was thinking about her. However, since there were no cell phones, and with her being in the field taking service calls that made it a bit hard. I didn’t want to cause her to pull over at a pay phone just for that.

Yeah, and?

I’m getting there… I’m getting there… As I’ve said many times before, I’m a leg guy, and E K has a fantastic pair said appendages. So, one of my fond nicknames for her, back then and even today, was/is LEGS.

Yeah, so you have a cutesy nickname for E K… Big deal… Just get to the point, Sellars…

Patience is a virtue, ya’know…

Well, to be honest I figured y’all would have been all over it by now…  But, just to cover all the bases, it’s as simple as this: Whenever I wanted to tell my dear and lovely I was thinking about her, I would simply page her with the following number: 5663714

On an upside down numeric pager that’s ancient, “First Generation Text Speak” for hi leggs:

Yeah, I know, the second “g” seems unnecessary, but remember, as mentioned in the Mahwage blog entries, she always wore Leggs brand stockings. Plus, without the extra digit in there, the “phone number” looked incomplete. And, well, since the pager belonged to the company it was our way of being “covert”…

I mean, what with E K actually being a sexy, dangerous, femme fatale secret agent* and all…

More to come…

Murv

* Regarding E K’s secret agent status. See blog entry: “Kay…Eeee Kay…” March 12, 2009

What you are about to read is probably going to seem just a bit bizarre. But, then again, all of my blogs have a tendency to read that way, or so I am told. In any event, this is a “two-parter”, and as bizarre as it may seem to you folks as you read it, bear in mind that it is true… actually happened… no kidding… so, imagine how I felt at the time…

The phone rang and I looked over at the over sized digits on my LED alarm clock. (Yeah, this was back when big, wood grain veneered LED alarm clocks were exceptionally cool and it showed just how amazingly hip you were if you had one…seriously… Owning such an alarm clock wouldn’t necessarily get you laid, but it didn’t hurt…) Even though one of the segments in the display was having a tendency to flicker on and off, probably due to a cold solder joint I hadn’t bother to repair just yet, I had learned to decipher the numbers and know generally what time it really was, no matter what they displayed.

It read something like 10:38 PM. In this particular case, that meant something like 10:38 PM. Yeah, go figure. The segment happened to be working at that particular moment.

I sat up,  stared across the room at where the phone was sitting on my desk and furrowed my brow. I couldn’t actually see the phone since the lights were out and all, but I knew right where it was. It rang again and I continued to stare in its general direction. You see, even though I was in my early twenties – like really early twenties – and was all about partying just like anyone else my age, I had to go to work the next morning. I even had to go in early because I was the assistant manager of a VideoConcepts™ at the Northwest Plaza mall and it was my turn to open the store.

This is not to mention, although I already mentioned it,  that the hour was 10:38 PM give or take a few minutes, depending upon whose version of accurate you happened to be following.

“Why is that important,” you ask?  Well, because you just don’t call someone after 9 PM or before 8 AM unless 1) Someone is dead, 2) Someone has been in a bad accident, or 3) You’re in jail and need to be bailed out. There are even sub-qualifications, like with #1, if the person who is dead isn’t all that close to the person being notified, then instead of disturbing them that night, you should add them to the list of people to call after 8 AM the next day.  Or with #3, if the offense is so minor that they are just going to spring you in the morning, grab a nap and leave your friends alone. You got yourself into the mess, not them. There is, of course, the “I just killed someone and I need you to help me hide the body” clause, but that can only be invoked with certain friends, so you have to be careful with it.

In any event, that’s just the way it is. Everybody knows the rules.

Seriously. Those are the rules. At least, they are in the south, where I am from. I know,  I know… Since I was living in St. Louis I wasn’t technically “in” the south, but since I was at home, it was kind of like a foreign embassy – i.e. when within the confines of that property line you were on southern soil and therefore you obeyed southern rules and etiquette.

At this particular moment, I was pretty well convinced that I had a breach of etiquette on my hands.

I continued staring in the direction of the phone. For the life of me I couldn’t imagine who would be calling at this hour. I doubted anyone close enough to me to qualify for any of the pre-requisites listed above was out and about, so I knew there were no deaths or injuries to be reported. And, all I could say was that if bail was involved, someone was going to need to do some fast talking.

The infernal device hadn’t yet stopped clamoring so I climbed out of the bed, flipped on the light switch then padded around the end of my king sized waterbed to my desk and picked up the handset.

“Hello?”

Click!

“Lovely,” I thought. Well, I’m not actually sure what it was that I thought. I am, however, fairly certain I muttered something on the order of “F*ck you too.”

I settled the phone back into the cradle then turned around and started back toward the bed. Before I’d made it two steps the  nuisance began to ring again. I turned in place, went back to my desk, and snatched up the handset.

“Hello?”

Tick, Tick, Tick… Click… Tick… (silence) Skrrreeeeeee-warble-skreeeeeee…

“What the f*ck?” I muttered aloud.

Remember, this was nineteen-eighty-five. Fax machines weren’t exactly commonplace so picking up your phone and hearing a carrier signal from a misdial… Well, that just didn’t happen all that much. (BTW, just as a point of interest – Facsimile Machines – as we called them back then before truncating words became all the rage – were also huge, had a  rapidly spinning drum to which you attached your document, and took approximately 7 1/2 minutes to transmit a single page at low resolution… I know this because we used one at the VideoConcepts™ store to transmit customer credit applications to the corporate office.)

Still, even though hearing a warbling carrier in your ear wasn’t exactly heard of in that day and age – at least for the average Joe – I had a bit of a clue. I had been working with computers since I was 15 – anything from programming to tech work – when I could get that sort of work, that is.  And, when I had started in the biz, communication between systems was done by acoustic coupling modem. If you don’t know what that is, rent the movie Wargames with Matthew Broderick and watch it. When he dials the phone, listens for a carrier, then plunks the receiver down on box with some foam inserts that look like they were designed just for a telephone handset to fit into… Well, that’s an acoustic coupling modem.

My point is, I had been around this block. I knew exactly what a modem carrier signal sounded like. However, I certainly didn’t consider it normal that I was hearing one screech out of my personal telephone line.

Now, in 1985 we had actually moved beyond acoustic couplers. We were using A-D modems – either internal or external – to which you simply plug in your phone. Of course, back in 1985, a speed of 300 bits per second was the norm, and 1200 was high end. 2400 was a brass ring on the nearing horizon.  If all that means nothing to you, I understand… But, to give you a comparison, your average home computer talks to the internet via low end DSL at around 512 – 768 Kilobits per second. High end you are talking about 3 Megabits per second or better. See the contrast? Figured you might.

But, anyway, the roundabout point here is that I knew very well what I was hearing.

Out of curiosity, and nothing more, I sat down at my computer, still holding the phone in my hand. I flipped on the monitor, then the CPU and watched the green cursor wink at me from the monochrome screen while it booted up. I was running an an actual IBM model 5150 CPU, but I had pulled a Millennium Falcon on it, and to quote Han Solo, had “made a few special modifications myself.” Yeah, soldering irons, discrete components, and some tech knowledge can get you into serious trouble. So, I was running an overclocked processor and some fast DIP RAM, so my “big blue streak” was pushing about 6.5 Mhz instead of the stock 4.77 Mhz… woohoo… whoa! slow down before you hit something. Again, the perspective thing for those not familiar – the average CPU speed these days is 1.7 Gigahertz or higher.

Yeah…So you can see what I was dealing with. But, look at it this way. It was 1985 and for its day, that box was lightning fast. Relatively and metaphorically, of course…

The system finally booted up, to DOS, from diskettes. (No hard drive… I didn’t get my first hard drive for another several months and it was a whopping 10 Megabytes in size and cost me right at $600 with the controller.) Unfortunately, although I had now arrived at a command prompt, the phone had clicked and gone dead.

I dropped the handset back into the cradle, then slipped a modem communications program diskette into the B drive (I had TWO, count ’em, TWO 5 1/4″ 360Kb floppy disks… big time stuff.) I had only just started typing in the command to execute the program (yeah… we had to do stuff like that back then… no pointy, no clicky… A whole lotta typie though…) when the phone started ringing again.

Instead of answering it I sat there gesturing at the screen in hopes that doing so would make the program load faster.

It didn’t, but I still tried.

The communications protocols loaded, the core of the program bootstrapped, and then finally, the application screen appeared. I cursored down the menu (this was a pretty fancy piece of software) and hit enter to drop myself into the command mode. As fast as I could I typed an alternate initialization string to reset the modem and put it into auto answer mode. When I hit enter at the end of the string of characters, the screen cleared, the phone cut off mid peal, and several lines of gibberish scrolled across the monitor.

There was a quick screech, then a loud click from speaker on my internal modem, and then silence. The cursor just sat winking at me.

On a hunch, I “control keyed” myself back to the command mode, reset the modem with the same initialization string as before, then waited. A few seconds later, the phone did indeed start to ring. My init string had included a command to keep the modem from picking up until after the third ring, so I waited impatiently as the old bell on the desk phone rattled, rattled again, and then rattled a third time. As it started to ding a fourth time, it was interrupted and the modem clicked.

Once again a screech issued from the speaker inside the box, then warbled, then screeched again. A warble-screech-hiss combination followed and the modem clicked again, but it was a different kind of click, and it was one I recognized.

It was a connection.

More to come…

Murv

… NEXT: Who Is This, And How Did You Get In My Computer? PART 2