But the computer says ...

While geezers in particular, and those who came of age before the Age of Computers in general, tend to be skeptical of the younger generation’s absolute trust in every byte and bit spewed from their mighty Macs and Windows wonders, I lean toward adapting at least the more useful pieces of the technology, although without the pure reverence of the gullible generation of pre-geezers.

The following account is true in every detail, and the incident, which occurred a decade ago, fixed in my mind that one must be wary of those who worship in the church of the computer.

After waiting in the checkout line at my local public library for quite some time as an obviously novice librarian ploddingly worked to send patrons home with their books, my turn finally came and I place my selections on the counter, where a young lady of perhaps 16 or 17 years of age began the computerized checkout process with my library card. But something on the screen terribly and visibly upset the young lady. Turning to me with a sad but strangely triumphant look on her face, the girl spoke.

“You have four books way, way overdue—and you own a really big fine! You can’t check any more books until you’ve returned them and paid the fine.” She spoke these words with what I considered an inappropriate degree of disgust. But she was done with me and called out, “I can help the next in line.”

But I was not done with her. “Young lady, I returned those books last week and paid the fine.”
Looking past me, she repeated, a bit louder this time, “I can help the next in line.”

I must explain that the fine I paid was close to $20—and one does not forget a $20 library fine. Firmly yet gently, I told this well-meaning guardian of the stacks that I had definitely returned the books and paid the fine.

“Sir, the computer shows that you definitely did not bring them back,” she said. “Furthermore, the computer indicates that there is still an unpaid fine on those unreturned books.”

I suggested a shelf check, a simple procedure that involves nothing more complex than walking to the spot in the library where the books would be, if properly returned according to their Dewey decimal classification. But this fledgling librarian was so trusting of the information displayed by the computer that she rejected my request instantly.

Indeed, one would have thought I’d asked her to play in traffic blindfolded, so great was her indignation. “That will not be necessary,” she spat at me. “The computer clearly shows that those books were checked out in your name and have never been returned!”

Taking the matter into my own hands, I marched off to the stacks, found the four books precisely where I knew they would be and returned to the checkout desk with the “missing” books.

Setting them down ceremoniously, I said, “Young lady, here are the books you say I did not return.” I stepped back and waited for her apology, and was quite ready to offer my forgiveness.

But I was stunned when she stated with absolute confidence that these books could not be there.
“Sir,” she stated slowly, assuming that I must be quite dim, “the computer says that you have not returned certain titles and may not check out books until the overdue books have been returned and the fine has been paid.” She dismissed me with a satisfied toss of her head and turned to serve the next person in line.

Now I’m not by nature a mean man, but this was too much. “Young lady,” I said slowly, assuming that she must be quite dim, “sitting before you are four books that you say I have not returned. If I had not returned them, how was I able to bring them to you so quickly. Are you going to believe that computer—or your own two eyes?”

She looked at the books, then at the computer screen, then back to the neat stack of books that proved her beloved computer was wrong. With a look of disbelief and the beginning of panic, she began to sob, then started to shake all over and finally, she burst into tears.

It was hard to hear her, so racked with sobs was she, but four words were discernable: “… but the computer says …”

Almost instantly, she was surrounded by her fellow librarians embracing her and glaring at me with looks reserved for murderers and pet abusers. I wanted to explain what had just happened but realized that to open my mouth again would likely result in my being pummeled by a herd of protective librarians and a mob of indignant library patrons.

Suddenly and miraculously, the librarian to whom I had paid my fine returned from a coffee break, and when she’d been told of the cause of the uproar, settled the issue instantly. I wish I could report she saved me in a dramatic manner:

Leaping atop the checkout desk, holding aloft a laminated copy of The Dewey Decimal System, shouting to the infuriated mob, “Away with you all! This man is innocent, and we do not hang the innocent—not in my library!”

The reality was decidedly calmer than my imagination. “He paid his fine last week. I must have forgotten to clear his record. Sorry.”

And so I survived, but I did not check out any books that day. In fact, I didn’t return to the library for several years; I took to heart the words of English writer John Ruskin, who said, “A book worth reading is worth buying.”

Since that unpleasant encounter in the library, my own gathering of books has exceeded 2,000 widely varied volumes. I have books on American history beginning with the experiences of Native Americans, world history, baseball (my deepest passion), literature from Adams to Wolfe, volumes on art and music, and a wealth of biography.

I do not own a single book about computers.

“Fixed—or set?”

An automatic coffee maker is such a simple and apparently innocuous device—something quite unlikely to cause an argument between a devoted married couple, one would suppose. But it was indeed an automatic coffee maker in our happy home that started a rather loud but thankfully brief exchange. Rarely do my dear wife and I have cross words with one another, but on those occasional flare-ups, the cause is almost always words. Actually, the cause is my insistence on the proper use of words as opposed to my wife’s often haphazard employment of language.

To tell the whole story, I must take you back to the beginning of our relationship: Not long before we were married, some 30-odd years ago, I mentioned to this sweet young lady who had accepted my proposal of marriage that words were important to me. She said that words were important to her as well: “How’d we know what’s what and who’s who and what’s coming down, without words?”

My memory has begun to fail at times; some events have begun to fade like Samson’s post-hair cut strength, but that comment and my reply will never be erased from my mind. I must explain that my bride-to-be was a recent college graduate on her way to an advanced degree and thus a well-educated person. Further, you need to know that I am a bit older than this woman with whom I have spent the better and best part of my life, and even back in the infancy of our love,
I had little tolerance for the younger generation.

“ ‘Words have the power to both destroy and heal. When words are both true and kind, they can change our world,’ ” I said, quoting Buddha. “ ‘Handle them carefully, for words have more power than atom bombs,’ was Pearl Strachan’s advice,” I said. “And Shakespeare wrote, “I will be free, even to the uttermost, as I please, in words.”
I was just warming up: “And Confucius …”

“…is dead!” She cut me off sharply. “Can you quote any living geniuses?”

Ignoring this absurd remark, I used my favorite quotation about words: “Mark Twain said that ‘the difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.”

“Well, ain’t that just silly,” said this charming lady who I suddenly realized I did not know as deeply as I’d previously thought. Of course I know now that this was her idea of “fun;” she has always enjoyed bursting the bubble of pretension she has noticed about me from the very beginning of our relationship.

“Let me share a couple of my favorite word quotes,” she said with a toss of her lovely head and a sneer on her pretty lips. “ ‘Many wise words are spoken in jest, but they don't compare with the number of stupid words spoken in earnest.’ That’s Sam Levenson. Dennis Roth said, ‘If it takes a lot of words to say what you have in mind—give it more thought.’” She was on a roll. “I don’t know who said this, but I like it: ‘The Gettysburg Address has 272 words. A bag of Lay's potato chips has 401 words.’”

Jumping ahead to our kitchen and the new coffeemaker: “I fixed the coffeemaker so I can make a nice pot for tomorrow morning,” said my dear wife.

This disturbed me a bit because I had just bought a brand new automatic coffeemaker for her, to replace a worn-out machine that lacked a timer.

Let me explain: my wife has a routine that involves, among other things, getting up at a certain time every morning. Before my semi-retirement, I used to get up before her and it was never a problem for me to turn on the coffeemaker she had filled with water and ground coffee before she went to bed. Daily for decades, she was greeted with fresh coffee and a kiss.

Now, however, I’ve slacked off my early-rising habit and my dear wife must be fed coffee instantly upon arising or her day—and mine—begin poorly. Only our five cats do not suffer when caffeine fails to enter my wife’s bloodstream soon after rising. And that is why I bought a very nice automatic coffeemaker—a quite expensive one that should not have had to be fixed so early in its career.

“Fix? You had to fix that brand new coffeemaker a week after I bought it?” I was already planning a trip to the Mall when I realized that the thing wasn’t broken—my wife had just used the wrong word. Again.

“Oh—you meant to say that you set the coffeemaker,” I explained to her. “You didn’t fix it—you set it. To fix means to repair. To set means to …”

“Drop it, or I’ll fix you,” she said firmly. Remembering what happened to the cats when she used the word “fix,” I dropped the subject quicker than instantly and have never—and will never—use that word again.

I am not a Boomer – I’m a Geezer

The modern meaning of geezer is “an eccentric (unconventional and slightly strange) or irritable (easily annoyed) old man.” That’s me in a nutshell—pun intended. The original meaning is quite a bit different: “a masquerader, someone who wears a mask or is otherwise disguised.”

Each and every one of us carries the burden of any number of labels. Many are handed to us in childhood and we often wear them into old age. For example, being an awkward, often tongue-tied, heavy-set boy, I was labeled a loser. Picked last—if even chosen—for teams, ignored in the classroom and the playground, I accepted the label and became angry and bitter.

And you, dear reader, are wearing a few labels as well, probably as unkind and unjustified as mine. I hope that you had wise people in your life, as I did, who showed you the folly of allowing others to choose a label for you.

Of all the classifications and pigeonholes used to label me and everyone born between 1946 and 1964 over the years, none is more ridiculous than “Baby Boomer.” Call me a geek, as many have. Say I’m a fuddy-duddy, as my mother did. Even call me an old fogey, as my wife does, or weird, a term my father thought fitting for me. To a certain degree, I am truly all of those things.

But to call me a “Boomer” just because I was born during an 18-year period of national fertility is silly. My eldest son was born in 1978, the year of the first test-tube baby. Shall I call him a “Test-tuber?” Is he part of the “Test-tube Baby Generation? Since my second son was born in 1981, the year of the very first portable computer—the Osbourne I—must I call him an “Osbourner?” I have a third son, born in 1983, the year the Cabbage Patch kids were introduced—but we’ll go no further along that line.

No, if a label must be affixed to me to satisfy some odd American penchant to give everything a title, let mine be a genuine reflection of who and what I am. And I won’t let anyone chose it for me. Just because I’m teetering on the edge of old age, don’t call me a senior citizen, a Golden Ager, or any of the dozens of cutesy little labels worn to erase the pain of piled-up decades of time—or to dismiss us from the workplace and the world.

No, my friends—I am a Geezer, and proud to be one! There’s a touch of each part of the definition at the top of this column in me. But even though I’m from an earlier time, I don’t long for “the good old days.” Actually, in many very important ways, back then wasn’t nearly as enjoyable as here and now.

A few years back, after a particularly frenetic and discouraging day, I said to my mother, “You were lucky to grow up on a farm in the good old days—life was better back then.” She smiled at me in a way that told me a lesson in the art of living was about to be taught.

“The good old days on the farm, you say,” she said. “You mean when, if you wanted bread, you had to bake it yourself, because the closest store was 10 miles down the dirt road—and they didn’t even sell bread? The good old days when, if you wanted milk to go with the cookies you baked from scratch, you had to milk a cow? Or do you mean the days when, if you needed to visit the bathroom in the middle of the night, you got dressed and ran through the snow to the outhouse—are those the good old days you say were so much better than today?”

Silly me. I ignored her wisdom and replied, “Yes, I’d go back then in a heartbeat. Life was so much simpler in those days!” (Statements like that added to my father’s opinion that, “You are a weird boy, Tommy.”)

I admit that I tend toward weirdness at times, and that fuddy-duddy (old-fashioned, narrow-minded and pompous) and fogey (a person behind the times) are labels I deserve and wear with pride.

But never call me a Baby Boomer! I am a Geezer—an elderly, balding, feeble-bodied man with a gray scraggly beard and a cane—with a heart and mind full of fun and tricks. I may wear the disguise of a shuffling and stooped old man, but inside, I’m a real hoot. I am a Geezer, and proud to be one.