In an Age of Louts, Sparks of Civility

It takes manners to prevent modern technology from making life misery

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

(From the December 2009 issue of The Atlantic Times)

 

How a tiny gadget brought our correspondent to his knees, and how a kindly human voice raised him back to his feet. Tales of rescue from precipitate hell in a weird new world.

 

Never in my 73 years have I knelt for so long. The object of my genuflection was in this particular case not God. I was on my knees in a dark corner behind the computer desk in my new apartment in Irvine, California, swearing like an infidel at inconsiderate corporate louts responsible for the miniscule numbers on the labels of my Cable TV modem and my router.  The two gadgets would not communicate.

I called technical support with my right hand on a cell phone, and was made to perform a penitential act. My interlocutor was a young woman. She spoke with a little girl’s voice, a fashionable affectation. It’s bad enough when they do this to you face-to-face. But squeaking at me wirelessly is physical abuse. You can only guess what people like that are trying to say.

 I think that she wanted me to give her the “MAC ID” on the back of my router. I squinted at the device in despair and then begged her, “Please wait a few minutes. Perhaps somewhere out in the street I’ll find a two-year old with eyes good enough to read this ridiculously small print.” She hung up; baby-voiced tech support agents have no sense of sarcasm.

 Again and again I called tech support, still kneeling. Finally I got hold of a rare specimen of human kindness even the world of electronics could not manage to phase out. He sounded like a schoolteacher and waited patiently as my wife, Gillian, rummaged through our unpacked boxes in search of a magnifying glass and a flashlight; he even suggested that I got off my knees for a while: “Sit down, rest a little,” he advised me.

 In the end I deciphered the “MAC ID” with the help of my grandfather’s hand lens, thus enabling my anonymous helper to perform a series of long-distance tests on both gadgets, but to no avail. “You need a new router,” he concluded, and the ordeal was over after a procedure that had taken four times as long as an angioplasty.

 Even the aforementioned two-year old could probably have figured out that all this made little economic sense. This waste of corporate time – and my own -- could have been avoided had the manufacturers of the router and the modem possessed the benevolence to print “MAC IDs” and serial numbers in readable fonts.

 It takes upbringing to think of these things, and manners are in short supply in this narcissistic culture haunting both sides of the Atlantic. Just before moving to California, I observed the contrast between the effects of the technological “Me” society and a display of basic humanity in an extraordinary place – the railway station of Angoulême in southwestern France.

 It has lately been beautifully restored at taxpayer’s expense. The officials working here have bright and generous offices. But then there was evidently no money left for escalators leading to the platforms. Our luggage was heavy, and I had just recovered from a heart attack. How do French railroad bosses expect a septuagenarian couple to carry four suitcases down a steep flight of stairs and up another to the Paris-bound train on platform 2? Well, the answer is that they didn’t care.

 But the acting stationmaster of Angoulême, a comely blonde in her 20s, did care. Though this was beyond her call of duty, she shouldered our baggage and carried it to our carriage while she herself was getting drenched in a sudden cloudburst. She did more. She saw to it that a young man picked us up upon our arrival at the Montparnasse station in Paris. He turned out to be a student of art history. As he took us to the taxi stand, we discussed the link between Reformation-era paintings and 20^th-century surrealism.

 Thus two exquisitely mannered young people trouncing the soullessness of this technological age dominated by louts was a triumphal experience. That was good news.

 Gillian and I remembered this on the next day in the quaint old German city of Wetzlar north of Frankfurt. Wetzlar was once the seat of the Reichskammergericht, the supreme court of the Holy Roman Empire. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe based his epistolary novel, “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” on an episode of unrequited love in his own youth while serving as an intern at this exalted judicial institution.

 My own “Wetzlar sorrows” were travel-related. We took a bus from our hotel to the station. It was a brand-new vehicle filled with school children. When I was their age, my father, who was blinded in combat in World War I, refused to take a seat in a streetcar as long as a single woman or older man was still standing in the aisle; in those days buses and trams had banquettes reserved for wounded veterans.

 In Wetzlar, no child offered his or her seat on the bus to any of the older people on board, not even to a handicapped passenger. Worse still, none of the adults urged them to get up. At the station, which also had no escalators to the platforms, the kids raced across the tracks, dropping candy wrappings. The engineer of a regional train watched their dangerous behavior from the side window of his locomotive and said nothing. What could he do? He could not leave his train.

 My sense of gloom darkened when I reached Frankfurt’s central railway station, the busiest in Europe.  Daily, 342 long-distance and 290 regional trains pass through this magnificent terminal. But no longer are luggage carts available to the 350,000 passengers using this station every day. They were habitually stolen, causing the Deutsche Bahn AG, the German railroad corporation, annual losses €30,000 ($45,000), so the company eventually stopped replacing them.

 In Frankfurt, too, I experienced basic humanity defeating modernity’s misery. I injured myself. Blood spurting from my right hand, I hurried into the station’s pharmacy, where everybody seemed to back away from me, except for a young saleswoman. Without any prompting, she came around the counter and guided me to an office where she bandaged my hand. She turned out to be a first-year medical student.

 In Germany, you can actually receive help with your luggage if you turn to the railway station’s “service point,” usually a day ahead of your journey. We were lucky. A Sicilian-born porter by the name of Giovanni took us to the high-speed “Inter-City Express” (ICE) to Berlin. I said, to this train, not into it, as Giovanni would have for most of his 36-year career at this terminal.

The reason why he did not carry our bags to our seats was this: In Germany, the trains and the stations, though still state-owned, belong to separate corporations nowadays; working for the station, Giovanni was not permitted to board the ICE because it was the property of a “different” outfit. And thus it came to pass that 21^st-century corporate mindlessness precluded humans from doing things human.

 Racing at speeds of up to 200 mph toward the nation’s capital, ICE 592 abruptly ground to a halt just before reaching Brunswick.  To many rail travelers, this has become a hauntingly familiar sensation: Once again, somebody had thrown himself in front of this train. Now ICE 592 remained stationary for two hours while police and prosecutors investigated the incident.

 At this sinister moment, it was absorbing to observe the disparity in the behavior of our fellow passengers. Most lined up cheerfully for free soft drinks offered in the bar car. Others, though, had different concerns. They asked the train chief: “How is the engineer dealing with this traumatic experience? Can we do something for him?” Thus while we waited for another engineer to drive us to Berlin, a gulf emerged between two sets of contemporaries in a technological age: Some seemed more compassionate than others; but has this not always been so?

 On the next morning I boarded a double-decker bus. As in Wetzlar, it was filled with kids, clearly high school students, but how different they were! One young girl offered me her seat. I overheard her and her friends discussing American history, albeit it not very expertly. “Who was the first American president?” one asked. “Kennedy?” her classmate opined. “No, I think it was Nixon,” said another student.

 Still, they were so charming that when I left for California on the following day I was heartened: Civility is still alive, even though our age seems dominated by cold technology and ill-mannered louts.