Technology

We’ve all heard it said that technology is great until it isn’t, and I am here to give a witness. Amen and amen.

I am going to be very vulnerable with you today. I’ve told you a lot of personal stuff about myself, but this story really makes me look bad. Please have compassion, but please also give advice. I need help.

Technology is great and I love it. It allows me to look at a tiny screen and have a real-time conversation with someone on the other side of the world. I can take a picture of a check and it’s deposited in my bank account immediately. It tracks my hikes: distance, pace, elevation gain and loss, as well as my average heart rate. I can buy anything my heart desires with one click, keep track of my mother’s appointments, and zoom in on the radar showing that the rain is always over my farm and that’s why it is a sea of red mud. I can order Chick-fil-A for pick-up, browse available houses in Navarre Beach, Florida, just in case I get to go there, check in for my flight and get my boarding pass, and identify the type of mushroom I find in the woods. Listen to any music I desire, read the notes from my last doctor visit, and find a great recipe for dinner. This little thing I hold in my hands is truly a marvel of engineering. Just short of miraculous.

Until I try to send a text. Here’s the backstory, and I apologize for the length of it, but you know how I love a good backstory.

Ben and I raise beef cattle. Well, he raises cattle and I take pictures and keep records. But anyway, there are cows here. Four times a year we take a few of them to the processor and drop them off. This is often referred to as “freezer camp.” They are, uh, processed and hung for a bit, then cut and packaged according to customer orders, and we sell the meat in wholes, halves, and quarters.

Beef pick-up day is stressful, to say the least. Our processor is almost four hours away, so our day starts at 3:30. Saturday I got to sleep in until 4:30. I am responsible for bringing a notebook and pencil, sharpie, masking tape and packing tape (which I forgot this time), and the checkbook so we don’t have to pay the stupid 3.5% fee to use a credit card but don’t get me started.

We drive the truck and SUV there and pay for processing. (I’m sorry but this is why beef is so expensive. Everybody thinks it’s the feed or the hay or whatever. No, it’s the processing. Ask a meat-cutter sometime what they charge to cut a thousand-pound steer and you will not even believe it. Sorry for another mini-rant.) Then we wait for the guy with the forklift to bring our pallets outside.

The meat comes to us all cut, packaged, and frozen in boxes that are labeled by customer name. A whole cow is around nine boxes. A half is four or five. The processor only cuts in wholes or halves, and we have to pay extra for them to cut halves, which is why it’s cheapest per pound to buy a whole cow. If you order a whole or a half, you get to choose how the cow is cut—which roasts and steaks, how big, how thick, how much stew beef and the weight of the packages, things like that.

If you order a quarter, you’ll be sharing a half with someone else, so we fill out the cut sheet, then split the half, which is a whole process that involves Ben calling out weights as he puts things in two different coolers, and me writing all the numbers and having a nervous breakdown trying to add a column of numbers literally twelve inches long under pressure.

Finally we have it all divided up into coolers and write names on them all because we will get five hours away and totally forget which coolers belong to which customer. The good folks at WalMart in Taylorsville, North Carolina, know us by name and they run for flat-bed carts and cow-size coolers when they see us coming because we buy more several times a year. When fourteen gigantic coolers are not enough, there is some stress involved.

By this time we have decided where each of us will be going, so we know which coolers to put in the truck and which in the SUV. Once in a while we actually get this right and don’t have to play Tetris with a thousand pounds of frozen beef. This is even more fun when Ben is recovering from shoulder surgery.

Then we head to the nearest convenience store where we spend a mortgage payment on ice. The meat is fully frozen, but we often drive five or six hours to deliver, and occasionally we have to hold an order overnight. We have a lot of freezer space at home but not that much, so stuffing the coolers full of ice works fine and we’ve never had a problem with meat thawing.

F i n a l l y we are ready to hit the road, but before we do, we send a text to our first stops to let them know approximately when we will arrive. My route today was supposed to be Taylorsville to Northern Virginia, about five and a half hours away. It was to a guy who has been a long-time customer, but Ben has always taken his delivery. It was going to be my first time.

Ben had forwarded me this guy’s contact card (like you can do with an iPhone—this is the part of technology that’s great) and I had saved it as a new contact. So I went to contacts, started typing his name, and up popped his info.

I tapped the little message icon, and it gave me two phone numbers to choose from: mobile and work. I tapped mobile, and it started calling him.

I won’t go into a long explanation here because this backstory is getting away from me, but, as I’ve said before, I am an enneagram 9. I do not like phone calls. I am the person in the meme who stares at my ringing phone and wonders why you are calling when a text message I can ignore would suffice.

So I immediately canceled the call, but I still needed to text him. So I closed that app and opened the messaging app. I tapped on “new message” and started typing his name. Did his mobile number pop up as a choice? No. It did not. Only his work number, which does not have texting capabilities because it is plugged into a wall and he wouldn’t be there on a Saturday anyway. He would be at home waiting for me to deliver half a cow to his house.

I closed that message and tried again. No, Karen, you will not be texting this man’s mobile number. You may only text the one that does not receive text messages and why is this so hard?

My frustration was reaching fever pitch so I did what any intelligent 62-year-old would do. I did what I knew how to do and what I knew would work. I got paper (thank you, trees) and a pencil (yes, more trees), opened his contact info, and wrote his mobile number down like a Neanderthal. Then I opened a new message and painstakingly typed the number in while saying each digit out loud through gritted teeth. As I typed the last 8, his name popped up as if my phone were saying, why didn’t you just type his name? I could have driven to his house twice if this whole thing hadn’t take so long.

I imagine there is a way to get a message to this man without resorting to two cups and a string, but I could not figure it out. If you are smarter than a fifth grader, please tell me the correct process for future reference so I can join the twenty-first century.

(Also, I confess that I just typed “so I can join the twentieth century” and then had to go check what century we are in. Thinking is hard, y’all.)

Sincerely, Cavewoman