The Greatest Invention of My Lifetime

You have more than likely encountered a statistic which proposes that the sum of all human knowledge doubles every five years (or, insert whatever number the uninformed bloviater used while trying to astound you with his absolute command of fantastical facts).  The truth is, this oft used shock statement is an erroneous distortion of Moore’s Law which derives from an observation by Gordon E. Moore, co-founder of Intel, that over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. It has become a standard maxim used to forecast computing business growth. It in no way attempts to quantify the future occurrence of spontaneous cranium explosions brought on by the need to assimilate ever more information about the world in which we live. Nobody really knows the rate at which human knowledge doubles because there is no way to quantify said subject. But this has absolutely nothing to do with the subject of this post.  I just like to occasionally demonstrate the great heights to which my Wikipedia information theft skill set has risen.

I was born into modest means.  My parents were somewhat typical members of what has come to be known as the Greatest Generation. Thank you Mr. Brokaw for setting a standard so high that no future generation will ever hope to surpass it! Is it any wonder that we seem, as a civilization, to have eschewed individual brilliance for common inclusion?

“Oh yes, they were the Greatest Generation…ever! No doubt; no need for us to strive for personal accomplishment.  Yes, it’s quite obvious that our best option is to huddle together in egalitarian delusion hoping, praying that our trophies and parchments that celebrate participation piled against the gate as a barrier will dissuade the barbarians from their attempts to open the portal and just go away to leave us to our conformist lives!” But I digress.

My love affair with keyboards began early.  I remember, when a small child, I was the proud owner of a toy piano.  No cheap instrument this, as it had real flats and sharps… not the painted on black stripes of inferior types.  I guess I was enthralled with the power of being able to manipulate the keys thereby producing the respondent musical tone.  From then on, whenever in the presence of piano (or organ, or any keyboard instrument) I would begin banging away.  Mind you, I had (and continue to have) absolutely no musical talent.  But I loved the tactile feel of cause and effect.  The affinity for pushing buttons in order to elicit a response has stayed with me, both literally and figuratively throughout my life. I apologize to any of you that might have been a victim of this particular proclivity.  

As part of my eighth-grade experience, I spent a small bit of time with my future high-school counselor mapping out a curriculum best suited to my talents and dreams. I believe he was happy to be meeting with the graduating class of Santa Sophia Academy as there were only forty of us compared to the public junior high across the street which seemed to be populated by uncounted thousands.  Perhaps that is why he spent our entire session with his head resting on his hand with his eyes closed; shaking it silently with every question I posed.  “Yes, Dale.  The school cafeteria will offer a fish option on Fridays. Now let’s get back to your selection of classes for ninth grade.”

In completing the pre-interview paper work I had indicated that I wished to be enrolled in the college prep curriculum and also try out for the freshman football team. This elicited yet another head shake and the revelation that I had better attend summer school. One reason was the tacit understanding the football players enroll in summer P.E. en masse to ensure proper conditioning for the upcoming season.  There were only two types of students enrolled in summer school P.E. Football players and students who had failed P.E. during the previous school year.  That in itself is an interesting story but best left for a future post. The second was a recommendation I sign up for pre-algebra as my standardized testing scores indicated a less than stellar grasp of that mysterious wisdom known as math.

Jump to the summer session between my freshman and sophomore years.  I once again enrolled in P.E., having successfully made the frosh football team and was subsequently invited to join the junior varsity the following year.  Having no academic shortcomings to repair and being too young to qualify for driver’s education, I opted, with a number of my teammates to enroll in typing as it sounded to be an easy grade and would likely not require the intellectual absorption of any new material. Picture if you will a class populated half by young female students with little chance of being accepted to college hoping to learn a marketable skill and half by oversized jocks looking for an air-conditioned refuge in which to avoid real academic exposure.

Of course the women, hoping to build that marketable skill set, and pulled by the magnetic charm of the teacher, a man with a chiseled jaw and sparkling smile, opted to occupy the seats in the front of the classroom where the electric type writers were located.  The football players, by habit, stationed themselves in the back of the room where they could make their snarky comments and apply as little effort as possible. We were assigned manual machines. Each day I would pound mercilessly on the battered Olympia, extolling the virtues of the jumping quick brown fox and deriding the lazy dog. After eight weeks of intensive practice I achieved a blistering speed of twenty-five words per minute. I was awarded a “C”.

My father, eager to assist in my academic success, plunged head-first into the effort of acquiring a machine on which I could improve my newly acquired skills.  As was his wont, he scoured the “thrifty ads” of the local newspaper: “Two lines for two weeks for two dollars!” Eventually he hunted up a used Royal manual that looked like a movie prop from His Girl Friday (Columbia Pictures, 1940, Howard Hawks directing). It must have had a twenty pound trigger pull which I am sure contributed to the chronic pain I experience in my knuckles as old age rears its head. The beast got me through high school and two rounds of college.

When I was nineteen years of age, I was hired by the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department as a Sheriff’s Cadet. It was a position most closely paralleled to a paid internship in the private sector.  It involved mostly clerical responsibilities.  (For exposure to the more interesting elements of this employment, see my previous blog posts: A Rip in the Fabric of Society and Keyless Entry.)  One of the requirements for this plumb job was an achieved typing speed of twenty-five words per minute.  To my great relief, I was never subjected to a typing test during the selection process.  I am certain my skills had eroded significantly since my high-school typing class.

I recall on one occasion, when the office secretary was absent, the Poway office sergeant asked me to type a letter he had composed to certain department higher-ups. Now for you youngsters out there, this was 1974; long before personal computers, the internet and e-mail had not yet been conceived, much less invented. As this document was official in nature I took the responsibility very seriously.  I lined up the letterhead pages and carbon paper very carefully. I painstakingly corrected every error through all four copies using that newly introduced miracle of written communication, White Out.  It took me four hours to complete the single page memo. When presented to the Sergeant for his review and signature, his only comment was, “Why didn’t you use the photocopier for the CCs (Carbon Copies for you digital age youngsters), Cadet?”

Later in my short career with the Sheriff’s Department, I was assigned to the central office Communication Center.  This facility was the nerve center of patrol where calls from distressed citizens were received and Deputies in the field were dispatched to their aid by way of radio transmitter.  Typically, much of the staff was comprised of older career Deputies waiting for retirement, disciplinary transfers or the walking wounded unfit for any but the lightest duty.  The level of enthusiasm among the denizens was such that when the Sergeant had to take a nature break, the deputies would roll their eyes in the direction of the Cadet to indicate he should take over the dispatch chair.  That’s right citizens of old; there were times when the ultimate responsibility for assigning assets to meet the needs of a terrorized public was in the hands of a twenty-year-old screw up.

One of the responsibilities of the com-center was inter-departmental communication of warrant abstract information to other California law enforcement agencies. For the civilians out there; briefly this means that when cops outside of San Diego County had apprehended a suspect and found that there was an outstanding warrant for his arrest originating from us, they would request the issue of a formal warrant abstract be transmitted via the statewide arcane computer system before they would “book” the fugitive.

Now it just so happened that the county employed a rather comely young female civilian clerk during regular business hours to respond to these warrant requests.  As our shifts overlapped in the afternoon I thought it my duty to learn as much about this communication process as possible in the furtherance of my value to the taxpayers so I spent any time I could under her tutelage. That made me the afterhours expert for operation of the teletype based system.  The process was simple. When a request was received, the required information was retrieved from the records department staffed 24/7 on the mezzanine floor above.  It was delivered to me via the vacuum powered tube system that served the facility.  Once in hand, I would look up the precise addressing protocol recorded in the three-ring binder on the teletype operators’ desk. I would fire up the teletype and key in the information.  This demanded absolute precision as any error would kick back the communication as undeliverable. Due to the state of communication pipelines of the day and the limited capacity, the systems would time out after just a few minutes and close your window.  To avoid this, abstract transmissions, instead of being entered into the communication line live, were first typed onto a punch tape to be fed into a reader that entered the data much faster than one could type.  So, the operator would key the data into a coding machine resulting in a series of holes being punched into a tape that could not be read by humans.  The tape would then be fed into a reader that could enter the data into the system within the time limits allowed and voila! Or rather, I would get a kickback message advising me that my attempt was unsuccessful and I should try again.

I don’t believe I ever successfully transmitted a warrant abstract in my brief career.  But, the commitment level of the Deputies assigned to the communications center being what it was, they let me keep trying until the day I was promoted to Deputy and transferred to the jail.  Hopefully no serial killers were ever released on my watch.  The curse of keyboard technology followed my into my business career… to be continued!