Jun 28, 2002
Distant
My ears hurt from too much feedback and crappy earphones. My bum aches from sitting in a hard chair. My back aches from leaning forward to a mic with a cord that wasn’t quite long enough to stretch from the back of my computer.
I’m suffering from two hours of talking with people via webcast at my college reunion, over on the west coast (wet coast, apparently today) of Canada, miles and miles and hours away (eight, I think).
The connection was poor, the video was crappy, the conversation was stunted by a twenty second delay, but I’m glad I did it.
Above all, it reconfirmed my feeling that I really was better off not going. Two hours of trying to make stunted conversation with people seen through a fuzzy camera was strenuous enough. God knows what it would have been like for a week, through fuzzy eyes.
Once the initial curiousity had been scratched, what would we say then? As little as we had during the last decade, maybe? Sometimes it’s hard to find something to say, really, despite this wonderful gift of technology. You think a twenty second delay is bad? You should try twenty seconds and ten years.
Now that’s a serious lag, a definite conversation killer.
