Tag Archives: people

“Privacy is only a recent concept”

blogging, ,

A news story I read recently about proposed new rules about when law enforcement agenices need to obtain warrants (and when they don’t) quoted a government official making the claim, “Privacy is only a recent invention,” implying that it can’t be that important since much of human history has existed without the notion of legally enforced restrictions on what information about you is public, and what is not.

Someone in the crowd apparently shouted out,”So is sanitation!” Sanitation is clearly something most of us do not want to live without. In other words, going back to the old days isn’t always a good plan.

I have a problem with the original statement, however. I mean, at least one of the lessons to draw from the old testament story of David and Bathsheba (and Bathsheaba’s ill-fated husband, Uriah the Hittite) is that Kings should not go about peering into the bathing chambers of other men’s wives.

I know, that isn’t what the official quoted above meant, but in a more important sense it is. A great deal of how any society works is an implicit agreement between us all to look the other way about some aspects of each other’s lives. And when we can’t, to pretend we don’t know some things about each other. I’ve known more than one mother, for instance, who admonished their children, “There are some details a Mother has a right to be spared.” In other words, part of the process of becoming an independent, functional adult is to experiment, make some mistakes, and learn from them on your own. And Mom really doesn’t want to know how you figured out what your favorite way to kiss is, for instance.

I wound up thinking about this a lot this weekend beginning with a moment Saturday when Michael and I were still laying about in bed. We had a fairly small number of things to do, and have been feeling stressed and over-busy, so lazing much of the day away seemed a good idea.

So there we were, overhearing some conversations outside, and finding ourselves giggling at some things. Things that weren’t particularly private or personal, and probably not any topics that would have changed if we had walked outside. But we were trying not to giggle too loudly because it could be taken wrong. And it wasn’t about us.

That evening, one of our neighbors, a guy in his mid twenties whose studio is directly below our bedrooms, was playing his electric guitar. He does that a lot. He has asked us to let him know if it disturbs us. It never has (though when he’s trying to learn a new lick, I wind up grabbing my head phones because the repitition is a bit maddening). That night his playing was a louder than usual. And also a bit wilder. I think I even observed to Michael that it sounded angry.

Sunday, we found out his mother had died the previous morning. Even weirder, we found out that the odd lady who had recently moved in with another neighbor was the mother in question. This is the neighbor whose wife recently died. So we had had this rather odd situation of a woman moving in with the alcoholic neighbor of her son, just because he happened to be nearby, and because the neighbor was desperate for a roommate.

I have already shared more details than are mine to share. But that’s what we humans do. We learn things about each other and we share them, whether the people we share them with are involved or not. Sometimes we pretend we didn’t share them. Whether we admit we know some details or not, we also make decisions on how we interact with people based on those details. Even when we believe it was wrong for us to find out in the first place.

It’s one thing if we decide not to be as friendly with the neighbor we hear screaming obscenities at his housemates at odd hours of the night. It is another thing, entirely, if we make hiring and firing decisions based on things we learn while snooping around the pages of their facebook friends. Or if we make search, seizure, and arrest decisions based on searching text message streams for keywords. Or other details that technologies have made it a bit too easy to collect. And often much less accurately than we are led to believe.

In the end, it’s just gossip. And that has been around for as long as there has been language.

Old fan, new fan, faux fan, true fan

science fiction, ,

I first became (remotely) involved in science fiction fandom around 1972. Back then, before the internet, cheap phone calls, personal computers, and so on, most fannish activity was carried out via actual paper transported from one place to another through the U.S. Postal Service. For a shy, gay 12-year-old living in a teeny town in sparsely populated corner of a Rocky Mountain state, being involved in fandom meant subscribing to someone’s ‘zine (short for “fanzine,” itself a portmanteau of “fan” and “magazine”), and writing letters back to people.

Not only was this before personal computers, but this was before affordable photocopiers. Most of those ‘zines were produced on either ditto machines or mimeographs. Which were expensive and required a lot of room for both themselves and supplies. So publishers of ‘zines were generally people who either worked for a school or a church, or were good friends with someone who worked for such an institution and would allow them to use it for person projects.

The ‘zine I subscribed to was produced on a ditto machine, so I would receive three or four sheets of paper covered in pale, fuzzy bluish-purple letters. At the time, there was a controversy about what sort of person was a true fan. The particular dividing line in the debate raging in the pages of the ‘zine was whether people who did not subscribe to one or more of the professional sci fi magazines, but only read short stories when they were collected into anthologies could be considered real fans (trufan), or merely dabblers.

Seriously! Not just whether you read sci fi, but how you read it was a bright dividing line between acceptance into the community or rejection. And being a faithful magazine subscriber wasn’t enough. There were more battle lines drawn. Some readers of Analog looked down on people whose favorite was The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, while readers of World of If didn’t think much of readers of Galaxy (especially after If was bought and merged with Galaxy due to financial problems). And there were always a few older fans who angrily asserted that nothing good had been published since Astounding had changed its name to Analog.

A few years later, it was the Trekkies who were reviled as the interlopers/pretenders trying to ruin fandom. Then as the Star Wars movies became blockbusters and inspired many more movies and television series than any of us had ever hoped to see, the Star Wars fans were consider the fakes in fandom. And so on.

Lately it’s been “geek girls” (a term I use only because so many of them embrace it; shouldn’t it be geek women? or at least geek gals?)—which are fake, which are real, and why should it matter. I do think the chauvinism of a lot of geek boys is more than a little responsible for this particular phenomenon, but I also recognize the pattern going all the way back to the magazines vs anthology books when I first joined up.

Part of it is basic human nature. As social animals who evolved in small groups often competing for resources, we’re hardwired to ascertain which people are members of our tribe or clan, and to identify outsiders. Particularly for those of us who grew up in environments where being a geek meant being viewed with derision at best by our classmates, figuring out which people share our passions feels vitally important.

But no one’s life (or livelihood for that matter) is at stake.

Then there’s the arguments about the difference between geeks and nerds. I once had a guy sneeringly tell me I shouldn’t call myself a geek unless I was a programmer or worked in IT. So told I told him the first program I created that executed correctly had to be loaded into the computer using punch cards. He didn’t seem to understand my joke about what a luxury it was for him to program on a screen, where cut and paste didn’t involve actual scissors. I then casually mentioned my years as a LAN administrator and desktop support tech and hardware qualification tech even though my official job title had been about publications.

Much more recently a guy told me I couldn’t be a geek because I was an Apple fan. So I made a UNIX joke, which he didn’t get. Then I asked him to explain the difference between ∂x (delta-x) and dx, which he couldn’t. Turned out he only knew how to mechanically find the derivative of a function. He had no idea what a derivative actually was.

As funny as I may find these bits of “turn-about is fair play,” I think there is a more serious issue underlying this. I may be a bit prejudiced, since it reminds me of the time decades ago when a small (but very vocal) group became outraged when a gay couple was seen dancing together at a dance at a local sci fi convention. Or the time I bought an old collection of the best sf stories from one of the years in the 60s, only to find the editorial written by a grandmaster author of the genre that was about how “f*ggots” (his exact word) were ruining science fiction, replacing good solid science with social, psychological, and biological commentary.

The question about the so-called soft sciences vs hard is beyond the scope of a single blog entry. But the fake geek girl issue is a natural outgrowth of the false notion that there is a direct and causal link between masculinity and technical skills. And it saddens me to see some geeks buy into the notion by calling others fake simple because of their gender.

That guy

people, ,

I try not to be that guy—the angry, impatient guy deeply affronted because you’re taking too long at whatever you’re doing, preventing him from getting on with his business. Ideally I wish that I could have the zen-like patience of a taoist monk. Taking what is happening in stride. Using the extra time I’m stuck waiting in line someone to think about things, or enjoy some music, or maybe play a little game on my phone.

But sometimes you are just tired, hungry, and sore. You just want to get finished with your errand and get home. So when something happens that holds you up, it’s hard to smile an wait patiently.

I came into work yesterday to some upsetting news about an oversight in a project we had just finished. An oversight that I and at least two other people ought to have caught, but didn’t. An oversight directly involved in my part of the project. We have a few days to fix things, and we quickly hammered together a plan, but it still meant that I spent the day doing something very different than I had planned, with more than a slight sense of urgency.

And I had to leave early for an end-of-the-day dentist appointment, which meant that I would be setting up my work computer after getting home from having the scary man attacking me with medieval implements drill and fill my teeth, and be productive for a few more hours. The dental appointment took longer than scheduled. An extra injection of novocaine had been required after a bit of stabbing pain happened partway through the second tooth. I just wanted to go home and collapse.

But I had the work to do. And I had two prescriptions that needed to be picked up. And a few other things that we needed at the store. Once I had picked everything up, I came to the front of the store and there were four registers open. Three had three people in line. One had only two. So I went for that one.

Big mistake.

The person in front of me was a tiny little old man with a great bush of silver hair. His shopping cart contained only one item: a 20-ish pound bag of dry cat food. The kid working the register was just handing the customer in front of Cat Food Guy her receipt and wishing her a nice night as I got in line.

The kid rung up the bag of cat food. Cat Food Guy handed the kid a couple coupons and his Store Card. The kid scanned those, then told the man price of four dollars and change. Cat Food Guy nodded, then searched his pockets until he produced a rumpled check book. Not a checkbook in a nice leather or plastic cover, just the bound bundle of checks. He had to search his pockets some more until he found a little rectangle of cardboard to slip under the carbon copy. Then he started writing the check.

Cat Food Guy muttered something about what day it was. The kid told him the date. Cat Food Guy stopped writing, looked up, and asked (well, really more of a bark than a simple question), “What did you say?” The kid repeated the date. Cat Food Guy said, “I know what day it is!” The kid apologized.

Cat Food Guy bent and started writing again for a millisecond. He stopped, looked up and said. “I’m just a little hard of hearing. Not angry or anything. People always assume I’m angry or having a bad day. I’m not. Just couldn’t hear you.”

The kid says he understands and apologizes again.

Cat Food Guy bends down again, but this time he doesn’t even get his pen back on the paper. He looks back up and says, “People don’t even ask anyone how their day is, any more, you know? They just assume!”

The kid says. “I’m sorry. How has your week been?”

Cat Food Guy, who had just started writing again, stops, looks up, and barks, “What did you say?”

“Just asking how you’ve been. Sorry, I’ll stop interrupting.”

Cat Food Guy shrugs, then goes back to writing. He tears off the check and hands it to the kid.

While the kid is typing on the register, Cat Food Guy babbles some about getting old, not being able to hear, and so on.

The kid nods while he’s working. He puts the check in the part of the register that is supposed to print on it, and pushes a button. The register spits the check back out. The kid says, “I must have done something wrong.” He pushes some more buttons, puts the check in, and this time the machine takes it. “There we go… oh, wait, now it wants me to check your ID.”

“What?”

Eventually the kid gets Cat Food Guy’s driver’s license, and tries to type in the license number, while squinting and apparently having a very hard time reading the license. Cat Food Guy is babbling something about a problem he had on the bus or something. I couldn’t really follow the gist of it.

The kid hands the license back and says, “That should do it.” And he presses another button. The register makes some noises. The kid frown. “Uh oh.”

“What?” Cat Food Guy asks.

“I may have spoken too soon,” the kid says. “I haven’t seen that message before…”

He looks up to see if the assistant manager in the next register is free. He’s not. There has been a steady stream of customers through all the registers except ours while I’ve been waiting.

“I’ll just have to ask the man—” the kid begins.

“You know what,” Cat Food Guy says. “Never mind. Just give me back my check. I don’t need this that badly.”

The kid is stunned. “Oh, I’m sorry, sir. I’m sure it’s just something I did wrong.”

“Not your fault,” Cat Food Guy says. “Not at all! It’s just the damn machines, all trying to take over our lives.”

He snatches the check and stomps away leaving his big shopping cart and giant bag of cat food smack in my way.

The kid looks at me and says, “I’m so sorry. Just a minute.” He gets the bagging gal to take the cart away while he takes the bag of cat food and scans it again to void the sale. He gets the assistant manager’s attention. “I’ll need you to verify the voided sale.”

Without even looking away from his own scanning, he tosses the kid a ring of keys with several laminated cards. The kid hits some buttons and scans one of the cards.

Cat Food Guy comes stomping back from nowhere. “You know what?” he declares loudly. “You can tell them to take this back and shove it! I don’t need to shop here ever again!” He slaps his store card on the counter.

The kid looks hurt. “I’m really, sorry, sir!”

“Not your fault,” Cat Food Guy says, suddenly all smiles. “It’s just those machines and the damn company!” And he storms off again.

The kid gets the manager’s attention again. “I don’t think I did it right.”

Manager steps over, looks at the register, and says. “Sure you did. Just hit enter again. See?” Then he notices the store card sitting on the counter. “What’s this? Did someone forget their card?”

The kid shakes his head. “The customer got very frustrated because it was taking so long, so now he says he doesn’t want to shop here any more. I don’t know what I should do.”

Manager rolls his eyes and expertly throws the little plastic card past the kid and into the wastebasket. “Not our problem.” And he goes back to his register.

The kid keeps apologizing while he quickly scans and bags my stuff.

I tried extra hard to be pleasant and assure him he has nothing to apologize for. Because he didn’t. I kept hoping that I wasn’t scowling or something earlier, because I had been getting pretty cranky.

I don’t blame the kid. He seemed a bit tentative at some tasks on the register with Cat Food Guy, but only at some tasks that I assume aren’t very common. For my stuff he was very fast and efficient.

I probably shouldn’t blame Cat Food Guy as much as I do. What he contributed to the delay was at least partly due to his hearing problem. I have a hard enough time trying to talk to Michael in the store, the noise from the overhead music and other customers talking can be quite overwhelming. And checks are the way we paid for everything for decades. The fact that almost none of us do anymore, that the procedures for processing them are longer and more involved that cash or swiping a debit card isn’t his fault.

Goddess knows I’ve been angry and said things to people who weren’t to blame for what I was angry about. I’m sure I’ve stomped angrily out of a place of business more times than I’d like to admit.

I think the most disconcerting thing was how Cat Food Guy kept switching demeanor. He would bark a sentence in a tone that I think any reasonable person would describe as angry or annoyed. Then turn all smiles the next sentence. I think most telling was how he said, “People always assume I’m angry or having a bad day.” If this is how he normally acts, I can see why people assume that.

I eventually got home. Michael cooked dinner while I got my workstations set up. I worked for a few hours. Sent chapters off for people to review. I goofed off a bit before going to bed. Had a really good night’s sleep.

I hope whatever poor kitty was waiting for food isn’t starving because her hard-of-hearing and cranky owner has stomped out of more stores empty-handed.