Price Hill Historical Society P.O. Box 7020 Cincinnati, OH 45205-7020 513/251-2888 phhs@pricehill.org
Copyright 2000-2010 Price Hill Historical Society
THE OLD CURMDGEON
THE DIVINE ELECTRONIC COMEDY*
I’ve talked before about the Cell Phone Area of the Tenth Circle of Hell, the one Dante Alighieri missed. But that is only one diabolical corner of the Electronic Circle of Hell. There are also sections for Computers and GPS Systems.
The Computer Section is in a dark, dreary area right in the center of the Tenth Circle, with a particularly nasty grotto reserved for P.C. geeks. Around the grotto is a dead garden, a special place just for Macintoshers. The whole place is full of computers with red-hot ENTER, BACKSPACE, and DELETE keys. The ESCAPE key does absolutely nothing, just like the one on worldly computers. The place abounds with poor souls pounding away on their key-boards, trying to avoid the red-hot keys.
I asked one lady how she had wound up in the PC grotto. “I don’t know,” she answered me. “I was a good computer user. I even sprayed my computer periodically with insecticide to prevent system bugs from spreading.” I knew it was time to move on.
The next area I visited was the GPS Section. It is quite a large area in the northern part of the Tenth Circle, but it is crisscrossed with one-way roads that apparently lead nowhere. The whole section was empty. I finally found one man wandering aimlessly, his eyes glued to a golden, palm-sized GPS that he held in his hand. He looked confused.
I asked him why he was the only one here. Were people that used GPS’s especially good and generally went to the other place?
“I don’t think so,” he answered. He looked around sheepishly. “I think they just can’t find the place.”
“That GPS looked pretty good sitting up on my dashboard,” he reminisced, “but the lady inside was the most annoying, rudest person. Every few minutes, she would sarcastically say, “Re-calc-ul-ating, Re-calc-ul-ating,” in the nastiest tone of voice. You would think that she could have been nicer. It was like she could barely tolerate me.”
“To be perfectly frank,” he continued, “I don’t know a lot about all this fancy new electronic stuff. I was still trying to learn how to use the cordless phones in our house when I wound up here. We had them for years, but I still hadn’t figured out how I could lose three phones all at once and have to run around digging under chair cushions and checking bathrooms and the dirty laundry baskets whenever the phone rings. I think I got a shock reaching into the washing machine for the phone that last time.” With that, the man wandered off down one of the endless one-way streets.
This has been another glimpse of the Tenth Circle of Hell, and probably the last of them. The other areas are full of Texters, Tweeters, Facebookers, and E-Bay Bidders. All a little crazy, and better left to their own devices.
Time for me to get the heck out of here. All I have to do is find the exit. Wish I had a GPS . . .
*This column was orignally published in the February 2010 Price Hill Historical Society newsletter.
The musings of everybody's favorite Curmudgeon appear monthly in the Price Hill Historical Society's award-winning newsletter, Heritage on the Hill. We'll highlight some of the columns from past issues here, but if you want to read the latest grumblings from the Curmudgeon every month, become a member of the PHHS to receive our newsletter. Join online at our MEMBERSHIP page.
If you like the Old Curmudgeon, Roy Hotchkiss, a book
that collects ten years of
his colums is currently available
at our Museum or through the PHHS online bookstore.
