Dear Amritsar,
I just met the greatest guy! His name is Bob – that’s not what’s great about him. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with the name Bob – I’m just trying to be clear about – you know what, why don’t I just start again?
I just met Bob, and he’s the greatest guy! We met at a fundraising candle making benefit for children who had been blinded by the random firings of space-based lasers. That’s not what’s great about Bob either, although it does show that he has a compassionate side, and that is pretty special.
Bob is a sentient mechanism karma infuser with Rossum’s Universal Robots, Inc. As the robots come off the assembly line, he programmes them with a random amount of positive or negative karma that they will then carry around with them for all of their working lives. Bob says it makes them just like us, except for the fact that they are all metally and digital and stuff.
I hadn’t realized that such a job even existed! That’s great, right? I think that’s great.
Anyway, Bob doesn’t have a cellphone, Blackberry or other personal communication device. Bob says that being around machines at work, he wants to get away from them when he’s not on the job. Bob claims he is a neo-Luddite who doesn’t believe in being connected to the Internet 24/7. I think he’s just cheap. Whatever. No matter how hard I tried, I could not convince him to get a PDA.
So, picture this. While everybody is happily texting each other up to their elbows in candle wax, I had to pass my Blackberry over to Bob so he could type in what he wanted to say, then he had to pass it back to me so I could respond. Back and forth. Forth and back. By the end of the evening, we were getting rude stares from people at the tables around us – I’m sure others there had started texting about the weirdoes who were sharing a Blackberry! When I got home that night, I tweeted that people should be more open-minded.
Still, I don’t know how this can work. Oh, Amritsar, what should I do?
Hey, Babe,
There is a solution to your problem: it is a skill called “conversation.” It is like instant messaging, except you do it with your mouth rather than your thumbs.
A good way to start conversations – or keep them going once they have started but seem to be losing momentum – is by asking questions. You know what questions are: they are sentences that end with a “?” in emails. You indicate something is a question in conversation by raising the tone of your voice slightly at the end of a sentence.
For people whose communication is primarily electronic, and whose oral communication has been limited to mostly monosyllabic grunting, conversation can, at first, be difficult. Impatient with how long the other person is taking to articulate a thought, you may be tempted to interrupt with your own thoughts. This is occasionally acceptable if it can be passed off as an accident, but, if done repeatedly, can end with a drink in your face.
Conversely, you may sometimes find it difficult to know when the other person has finished their thought, leading to long, silent pauses. This need not be a problem; in fact, if you can agree that these silences constitute a mutual understanding that surpasseth words, you could convince yourselves that they are something quite romantic.
Conversation, like any skill, requires practice. If you find it’s just not something you can become proficient at, you might want to consider getting voice recognition software. This would immediately translate Bob’s oral speech into words on your screen, and the words you type on the screen into words he can listen to. If any of your friends question this arrangement, tell them Bob has Gamer’s Thumbs and his doctor has ordered him not to use them; this should turn him into a figure of sympathy rather than ridicule.
Technology sometimes taketh away, but it also has the capacity to giveth back again.
Send your relationship problems to the Alternate Reality News Service’s sex, love and technology columnist in care of this publication. Amritsar Al-Falloudjianapour is not a trained therapist, but she does know a lot of stuff. AMRITSAR SAYS: Fallopian tubes are not the main method of transportation for people who live on the planet Fallopia. If in doubt, consult an ob/gyn or your family structural engineer.