Brooks Peterson

Monday, Mar. 22, 1999

World looks different to a Technician

   For some time now, I have been conscious of a puzzling and faintly sinister sense of discontinuity: a disturbance in The Force, if you will.
   Granted, we all change. We evolve. We mutate (could all this have something do with the time I got stuck behind a radioactive waste transport that was leaking green glop on the road?).
   In any case, as I was sitting around the other day, chewing the fat with Walt Lippmann and H.L. Mencken, I says to Walt, I says, "Y'know, this molding-and-shaping-opinion gig isn't playing out quite the way I expected. It's not just that Bill Clinton and Rich Holbrooke and Trent Lott don't return my calls. But Lamar Alexander doesn't return my calls. Pia Zadora doesn't return my calls."
   Lippmann waved me off impatiently: "Gimme a second, OK? I've got Harry Hopkins on the line here."
   Mencken just snorted. "Injustice is relatively easy to bear," he growled. "What really stings is justice."
   Yeah, well, thanks a lot.
   So there I was, stranded somewhere between a brown study and a blue funk; and then... it happened.
   For some reason - it really doesn't matter here - I needed to look someone up in our Polk City Directory. This, you may know, is an enormous work put out every year that lists everyone - everyone - in Corpus Christi. Oh, sure, the transients, the Winter Texans, the TDY types don't make it into Polk - but everybody else does, along with their address, phone number (usually)... and occupation.
   Then, moved by who knows what karmic impulse, I looked up... myself.
   You remember the classic scene from that masterpiece of understated metaphysical humor, Steve Martin's "The Jerk"? The utterly clueless protagonist opens the phone book - and is thrilled, enchanted, to find himself in it.
   In my case, it wasn't so much that I was listed: I expected that.
   No, what stopped me like an onrushing grizzly pole-axed in mid-charge was not where I was, but what I was. In years past, as I recall, I've been listed as "journalist." Depending on how you feel about editorial writers/columnists/auto writers, that seemed acceptable. I could live with it.
   But what gazes up at me from the page this time? I'll tell you what gazes up at me from the page: "tech."
   Tech? Tech?
   Thanking the fates for the higher education and the professional training that honed my research skills to a razor edge, I flipped to the front of the massive book for the translation that would lay bare the mystery of this cryptic notation. And there it was:
   "tech: Technician"
   Can you even begin to absorb the staggering implications of this? Here I've been slogging along all these years, resigned if not entirely content with my role as a wordsmith, an ink-slinger, a mouthpiece. Such was my station in life, and if it was not perhaps everything an idealistic young lad might have dreamt of - the Shamrock station down the street was in certain respects more impressive - it was my station, and I could live with it.
   But now this: This changes everything. I Am Technician. Look Upon Me, and Tremble.
   Already, all unbidden, exotic new words and phrases are entering my vocabulary: Megahertz. RAM. Byte. Download. Upload.
   And, of course, Interface.
   From frittering away my time as the custodian of the quaint and outworn usages of a bygone day, I have made your basic quantum leap: Lookit! On toppa the world! Out there on the cutting edge! Hey, I am the cutting edge.
   Where once I was seized by a sense of malaise and drift, now I am all purpose and decisiveness. As I stride through the newsroom, I look with calm satisfaction on the newscreatures hunched over their video display terminals, serving the computer gods. I Am Technician, and all is well.
   I owe all this to the Polk City Directory. And I feel especially fortunate because, sad to say, some of my colleagues, ah, didn't come out of this as well as I did. My immediate superior in this department isn't even listed, nor is one of my other two colleagues. The third is shown as... Retired.
   But that's their lookout. I have Technician stuff to do.
   You over there: Yes, you! Wipe that smirk off your face and... reboot!
   Man, what a rush. Life is good.
   ?
   (Peterson can be reached at 886-3772 or by e-mail at petersonb@scripps.com.)