A friend of mine came by the central office one day last week. He asked where Dr. Effler was. I told him I believed she was “Zooming.” He asked, “Oh, is she sick?” Possibly she might have been, depending with whom and about what her Zoom meeting was concerned.
“Zooming” has now become a primary form of computerized communication. “Zooming” in my younger days was practically, if not altogether, unknown. The word zoom brought me memories of an episode of the cartoon “The Jetsons” that involved “Spaceboy Zoom! And his dog, Astro!” (This is worth a Google search for the less enlightened.)
Zoom reminded me of the words that used to flash across the screen during fight scenes on television episodes of Batman. (BAM! Batman knew the word before Emeril.) Occasionally I would see the word “zoom” used in literature as an onomatopoeic term—a word that tries to imitate sounds via written language.
In my earlier years of working in the central office, there were several meetings held in surrounding counties or in Nashville that were “attendance required.”
In the beginning travel was exciting. There were new people to meet, ideas to be exchanged, sights to see, places to lodge and places to eat. As I aged, however, the travel started taking a toll on me. I couldn’t stay awake as I could when younger, particularly after I was diagnosed a Type II diabetic.
I began to dread those long drives and unfamiliar beds that made rest difficult and attention hard to give during face-to-face meetings.
Around 2010, some of my postgraduate college studies attempted to introduce me to Skype. I was never successful in accessing Skype. The next few years introduced the “webinar,” which allowed people to meet virtually from a few minutes to a few hours or across multiple days without having to leave the workplace. Early attempts were not always successful, but the process improved over time.
Last fall semester, I taught a Walters State reading course completely through use of Microsoft Teams. I felt like an astronaut—one small step for Ronnie Mincey, one giant leap for modern technology.
When COVID for all purposes shut down American business, education and religious observances for several months, technology became ever more necessary. It might for a while have been believed that things would never return to pre-pandemic normalcy, but it was refreshing to know that Americans seemed to want to again go out into public and renew/establish face to face contact.
Even in The Jetsons, George went to work, Jane went shopping, and Elroy and Judy went to school. Rest assured, America. It still doesn’t seem possible to live and thrive in our culture without some form of human interaction.
Now the rage seems to be Zoom.
But beware! Technology fads change like seasonal fashions. I noticed three women at church yesterday wearing assorted items of clothing that appeared to be made with black leather. I remember as if it was yesterday girls in college in the 1980s wearing leather skirts, though not black. I seem to remember shades of yellow from those days.
(Did I ever share with you my favorite color?)
Again, Dear Reader, I leave you with some tidbits from my email world.
The reason women don’t play football is because 11 of them would never
wear the same outfit in public. ― Phyllis Diller
The greatest sound in golf is the “whoosh, whoosh, whoosh” of your opponent’s club as he hurls it across the fairway.
Some old expressions have become obsolete because of the inexorable march of technology. These phrases included:
Don’t touch that dial, carbon copy, you sound like a broken record, and hung out to dry.
Shazam!
Show me a man with both feet firmly on the ground, and I’ll show you a man who can’t get his pants off.
When you hear someone say, “Well, I caught myself lookin’,” you know you are in the presence of a genuine Southerner!
In days of old, ladies wore corsets, which would lace up in the front. A proper and dignified woman, as in “straight-laced,” wore a tightly-tied corset.