IF ONE COULD TALK WITH RUDYARD KIPLING
Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” offers advice on character building and how to weather the vagaries of one’s fellowman. Unfortunately, it says nothing about coping with electronic devices, which is natural enough as the man died in 1936. A few of the lines from his poem have some relevance as one stares into a dead computer:
“If you can keep your head about you…
If you can wait and not be tired of waiting…
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster…”
But I wonder what he might have written had he lived long enough to enter the age of PCs and the World Wide Web. Perhaps “If” might read:
“If you can be denied access to your e-mail and not reach for a hammer,
If you can stare into a frozen screen and not pull the plug,
If you can treat the crash of your hard drive as an opportunity to take a holiday
And not send death threats to the retailer who sold you that piece of junk,
If you can lose control of your ruler bar but keep your voice as you scream at the machine
Or laugh when your text refuses to shift from single to double space
Or your copy completely disappears…
If you can cope with mountains of junk e-mail, scam artists and scads of invitations
To sign up for cheap Viagra,
Or can laugh when a pornographic website sends messages in your name to your mother,
Then you have lost touch with reality and need a straight jacket, my friend!”
(Blog first published 3/11/2011)
