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Amazing But True Posting Date: Mar 23 2009 12:52AM So this is what just happened. I was sitting in my family room watching a Toronto Raptors game on television. Nothing terribly amazing about that.
Except …
There’s a shot on TV of the Raptors’ head coach – a good Canadian boy from Niagara Falls named Jay Triano – pacing the sidelines and I think to myself, “Wait a second, that guy sitting in the front row looked familiar.” Small problem, though, the camera moved, the shot changed and Mr. Familiar Face was gone.
This is when the amazing kicked in.
I picked up the remote control and pressed “Rewind.” Yes, I rewound a live television show, backing it up about twenty seconds and then hit “Pause” to freeze the frame. Then, because this was a high-definition broadcast, I got a clear-as-a-bell view of Brian Decker sitting courtside wearing a maroon McMaster T-shirt under a grey zip sweatshirt.
“Holy crap,” I said, “that’s Brian. I gotta call to tell him I just saw him on television.” So I dialed – his cell phone, of course – and it rang and I talked to him briefly with him telling me that the courtside seats weren’t actually that good because the coach kept standing right in front of him.
Sure enough, next time Brian was on camera, he was twisting to peak around from behind the coach to see the action. So I texted him to suggest that he tell Triano to sit his ass down. After I sent the text, I looked up to the television in time to see Brian reach into his pocket, pull out his cell phone, read what was clearly my message and start nodding vigorously, knowing that he was on-camera and I, sitting in my family room, would see him.
Think about that for a second. This whole thing took about three minutes.
Up to 2006, I had gone twelve years without owning a television. I thought the internet was stupid until about 1998. In the first two jobs I had after graduating university, I didn’t even have an e’mail address. I got my first cell phone in 1993 and it only worked if I held it in my left hand and tilted my head sideways. When I was in university, the mother of a friend called his apartment, got the answering machine and didn’t realize that it wasn’t an actual person.
Of the remarkable series of events involving me, Brian and the Toronto Raptors, none could have happened more than about six years ago. That’s never happened before in the recorded history of human progress. Heck, until the Nineteenth Century, you could be reasonably confident that you and your great-great grandchildren would pretty much live your lives using the same tools and so-called technology. Sure, every now and then a printing press, a sextant or silk stockings popped onto the scene, but the number of people and professions that kind of stuff influenced amounted to fewer than a rugby team.
These days, if you accidentally slip into a short coma, you’ll wake up in a different world where your skills are useless, your memories are irrelevant and everything that looks vaguely familiar is three times smaller than you think it should be.
You have to work to keep up. I remember the first time I saw an automatic guitar tuner in person. I felt the way the Aztecs must have when the Spanish explorers predicted solar eclipses. I am witnessing magic! That was a guitar tuner. I remember the first time I saw a digital camera. Too complicated, I thought. I remember my first video game console, my first Walkman, my first computer, my first computer with a colour monitor, my first electronic calendar. Each time I got my hands on the new technology, it was like someone had shown me a magic trick.
Now, I have a phone that’s smaller than my wallet and it does all of that, plus it’s a television, database, stereo, photo album, radio, flashlight, bookshelf, ruler, compass, carpenter’s level, sketch pad and mosquito repellent … and I’m not even kidding about the mosquito thing. It’s even a GPS unit, which is something that was a plot point on Star Trek until ten years ago.
At this rate, my toothbrush will be a satellite dish by next Wednesday. I can’t wait to text Brian to let him know. |
