Remeber These Guys?

I met a couple of dinosaurs last week at the library; two people who seemed to have stepped out of a time-warp from the mid-twentieth century. They made me wonder about how much we, as a society, have lost by worshipping mass production, planned obsolescence and the bottom-line.

I watched them approach the internet stations; two large, broad-shouldered men moving with the easy rhythm of the physically fit. The older one wore his hair long and combed back, steel-gray curls caressing the collar of his plaid jacket.  The younger man was slightly taller, his black hair tightly curled as a lamb’s pelt. They had the same true-blue eyes and  the ruddy, weathered faces of men who spend their days outdoors doing stuff like chopping firewood and fly-fishing.  Although they shared no other facial similarities, for some reason I felt they were father and son.  

Taking a terminal directly in front of where I was sitting at the volunteer’s desk, they looked at the screen, then at the keyboard, then at the mouse, then at each other.  The older man reached out and delicately picked up the mouse between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. The younger man pointed to another internet station, where a teenager was zooming around Farmville. The older man placed the mouse back on the table and slid it around experimentally.

I was rather glad to see this. It had been a slow morning, and even teaching someone how to use a mouse, a task I normally dread, was a welcome event in a dull shift. I bookmarked my place in the novel I was reading and crossed over to where they were sitting.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

“We want to use the Internet,” the older man said in a mellow baritone, obviously using his inside voice.

“Have you used a computer before?”  

Unsurprisingly, they both shook their heads.

“Do you have a library card?”

I hoped they’d shake their heads again, so I could ask for ID and find out more about them, but the older man pulled a scuffed leather wallet out of his back pocket, extracted an ancient library card and handed it to me.  I gave them the Mousing 101 lecture and was surprised by how quickly and confidently the older man adapted to  this new, for him, technology. Fortunately, they were sitting at a station with one of the newer keyboards that hadn’t had the letters worn off the keys yet, so it was fairly easy to get them logged on and fire up a browser.

For most first time users, the next hurdle on the path to e-lightenment is understanding how the Internet works. I have learned it is generally easier to start this lesson with a specific goal in mind, so I asked them what they wanted to do.

The younger man dipped his oh-so-pat-able head and reached into the breast pocket of his green duffle coat to take out an envelope with a carefully printed URL on the back.  “We want to see this.” He was also a baritone and also using his inside voice.

I showed them how to use the address bar and we landed on the website of a company that made specialty plastics. After helping them find the product list, I left them scrolling through a photo gallery of bizarre-looking widgets. They hunched over the screen, occasionally stopping to discuss one of the objects in rumble-y whispers, while I pretended to read my book and speculated on possible uses for the oddly shaped objects that caught their attention. They seemed particularly interested in loopy things with asymmetrical edges.  Chastity belts for chickens?

After half an hour or so, the older man turned around and said to me, “We want to buy this.” He pointed to a loopy thing on the screen that looked, to me, just like all the other loopy things they’d discussed. This one must have been very special though, because it was just under ten inches long and cost sixty dollars.

“What is it?” I asked, foolishly assuming there would be a simple answer.

As near as I could figure out, after  the young man helpfully drew several sketches on the back of the envelope for me, they wanted to buy a liner for the chrome surround of a taillight. It was the last piece they needed to complete the restoration of the 1968 Pontiac GTO they’d been working on for five years. After a summer spent scouring scrap yards for a hundred miles around with no success, they’d been experimenting with making their own from an old bleach bottle when they learned about the specialty plastics website at a swap meet.  

Although I was impressed by this dedication, I couldn’t see the point of spending one hundred and twenty dollars, because they needed two of them, for something that could be made with an old plastic bottle and a pair of scissors. “Wouldn’t the bleach bottle thing work just as well?” I asked. “You can’t even see it when the light’s assembled. No one would know.”

They both looked at me with pity. The older man put me in my place with gentle simplicity. “We’d know.”

Properly chastened, I helped them maneuver the widget into their shopping cart, which took so long that I decided to take over the keyboard, since they only had a few minutes left on their session. I typed their address into the shipping information screen and hit a wall on the payment screen, which only accepted PayPal.  I raced over to the PayPal website and hit another wall when it insisted on being given an e-mail address, something they obviously did not have.

Now most new internet users would have given up in frustration at this point. These guys were made of sterner stuff. I fired up a hotmail screen, then realized I’d never get an e-mail account set up in time and flipped back to the order screen, hitting the print button, with seconds to spare, to ensure they at least had the part number. As the older man thanked me for my help and asked when they could come back to finish buying the part, the younger man carefully folded the print out, placed it in the envelope and tucked the envelope back into his breast pocket.

I watched them walk out of the library, as calmly as they walked in, and admired the patience required to invest five years in rebuilding a car, not to mention the dedication represented by an entire summer of searching for a ten inch loop of plastic that no one would ever know about except them.  I also wondered what kind of cave they lived in, if the Internet, and all the frantic hype it delivers, had no more impact on their lives than the waft of a butterfly’s wing.  I remember that cave, in a distant, nostalgic way.

I’m keeping an eye out for a cherry red, 1968 Pontiac GTO, hoping to catch another glimpse of those magnificent dinosaurs.