THE BLUE BOX (Recycled Ideas)
by Don Cox

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It started a couple of weeks ago, and it's been building ever since. It's the annual deluge of Christmas cards that I'm speaking of, the seasonal bane of a hermit curmudgeon's existence. Some of them have lofty themes of good will towards man, and show picturesque scenes of the Holy Land. The tanks and troop carriers are carefully disguised as tents, camels and stables. Other cards have jolly faced Santas with plump little reindeer on them, and a sleigh loaded with packages of materialistic overindulgence. Still others have all of the above with a letter enclosed. This printed sheet tells all of us recipients the glorious history of the past year in the lives of the senders. I may do one of these next week just to get even, we'll see.

Amongst all these rituals of the season's mail, there was one envelope this year that got my complete attention. It was from the Clones Society, the computer store in Ottawa where I feed my electronic yearnings for new gadgets I don't really need. I like the people who work there, they are unfailingly helpful and polite, even when they look at you with something between feigned interest and ill disguised contempt at your miserable uncomprehensibly minuscule knowledge of things digital. Well, so they should, after all, they are veritable oracles of digital lore. I like going there.

I looked at the envelope, then I looked again more closely, and yet again. My jaw dropped, and I felt excitement welling with every passing moment. It was the font! The font they had used for my address! It was absolutely amazing! It was a light weight font with large red letters, so light weight it might have been written by a pen. The "o" in "Don" was subtly different from the "o" in "Cox". I got out my reading glass to confirm. The "o" in Route 315 was just a shade different again. HOW DID THEY DO THAT???? I was completely shattered, I thought of the fuzzy logic necessary to work in the random differences, I wondered about the amounts of memory necessary, it must take a completely dedicated computer just for this one font. And what about the printer. "My God" I thought, "the printer driver must be at least 20 Megs and I wonder if they had to buy a dedicated printer to handle it. The whole thing was mind boggling.

Early the next morning I wolfed down some breakfast, put the card in a special folder, leapt into my car and drove to the Clones Society. I walked in the door with renewed respect, these guys were really pushing the frontiers, that was evident, they were in a class by themselves.

I walked to the counter, opened the folder and carefully laid the card in front of Luc. "OK" I said, "show me the printer, I want to see how you did this, and I want to know how much the software costs and when it came on the market." Luc seemed a little puzzled and Todd came over to see if he could help. "What's he talking about?" he said. "It's this font", said Luc, "he wants to know where we got it." Todd took the card and I saw the light of realisation come into his eyes. "Oh" he said, "this is the Diane font. Hey! Diane? Gotta minute? There's a customer here wants to talk to you."

Yes, you guessed it, their printer had broken down and Diane had addressed the cards by hand. She did a fine job too, and it's been an important lesson for me. I saw the team at the Clones Society in a new light. These weren't the great oracles of digital wisdom and experience that I had thought, and they weren't looking at me in ill disguised contempt after all. It was simply my personal inadequacies that were making me see the world that way. These were just neat kids doing their jobs like anyone else.

It certainly has helped me get these young people into perspective. They asked me a bit about where I lived and about life on a farm in a log shack. I suddenly realized a great truth. Imagine, here was a group of young people who had never seen a double bitted axe and who wouldn't know what a two handed hay knife was if they fell over it. I didn't try to explain these things to them, but I did think how sad it was that this old technology had never touched their lives. I could see that they regarded me as a great oracle of agrarian and woodsy wisdom.

As I walked out of the Clones Society, I marvelled at how little basic hands-on technology these people knew compared to me. They must have felt very inadequate, I hope they didn't detect anything on my part that could be construed as ill disguised contempt.

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