Remember when you were a kid, and your parents or relatives would say, “Well, you just think you know it all, don’t you?”
Unfortunately, today we often do…or can find out the information immediately.
It’s not that we’ve gotten smarter, but our phones sure have…
I remember the good old days when we could live in sheer ignorance. No, I’m not promoting stupidity — enough folks are around to keep that one going. I’m just saying that there was a time when we were ignorant. We wouldn’t know something, and we were okay with being befuddled.
Not now. And my husband is one of the knowledge infiltrators. Don’t know what I mean? Let me give you an example.
So, we’ll be out at dinner somewhere having a conversation with friends, and one of us will say something like “What was the name of that guy who sang backup on that one album for this band?”
Now if our friend and my assistant Bert, who knows a scary amount of music history all in his own head, doesn’t come up with the answer, my husband whips out his IPhone and says, “I’ll Google it.
And he does. And within seconds we all know who it was.
Again, I don’t want us all to walk around not knowing stuff. And I certainly don’t want us to revert to speaking like “Oooga Booga, Fire Hot.”
But sometimes it would be nice to have some mystery.
When I was a kid, if my mom didn’t know something, and she couldn’t put her hand on the information quickly (in the olden days before internet, IPhones, and Google), she would call the library system in Baltimore City – The Enoch Pratt Free Library’s Information Line. During certain hours in the day and into the early evening, you could call and ask them anything, and they would go and look it up for you.
When I was in middle school, my mom had gone to work at a now-defunct roofing company. The guys who worked on the jobs convinced her to call to find out where mohair came from. They kept telling her it came from a “Mo.”
My mom really was an intelligent woman (seriously, I’m just not saying that), but the guys had roped her in. She called, asking if it really came from a Mo.
When the information guy told my mom that it comes from a goat – an Angora goat to be exact – she hung up the phone just in time to have the guys burst into laughter.
Honestly, they may not have had any clue where it came from. But they knew it wasn’t from a Mo.
When you called the Information Line, you got to talk to someone, and you had a conversation. Sometimes, the person would be stunned at the information he/she discovered. You might even joke about it.
But with the immediate access to Google, we have a question and BOOM, we have an answer. There’s no mystery, no discussion. It’s just over.
I was talking about this with my husband and assistant the other day and said that I remembered reading a story over a decade ago about the Information Line. One of the questions they got asked the most was “What are the names of the Seven Dwarfs?”
So the three of us started naming them: Sleepy, Sneezy, Dopey, Grumpy, Happy, Doc, and…
And…
We couldn’t think of the last one.
“Wasn’t it Shy or something?” I asked.
“Well, it wasn’t Shyey,” said my husband, “That would be a stupid name.”
Yeah, but Sneezy is something you want to call your best friend.
We wracked our brains. None of us could remember.
“Bashful!” said Bert. “It was Bashful!”
But my husband and I didn’t think that sounded right. We kept thinking and thinking until…
“Do you want me to Google it?” my husband asked. “I know you’re writing about how you hate this, but it would put it to rest.
I waited for a little while longer until I could stand it no more and then sputtered, “All right, just Google it.”
He did. Turns out that the last dwarf was Bashful.
And now because by letting my husband Google the answer – and I had, in essence, become what I despised – I was, too.
Actually, I was probably more Embarrassy. But, let’s face it, that’s not a good name for a dwarf either.
Michele Wojciechowski, when she’s not trying to remember other useless bits of information without looking them up on Google, writes Wojo’s World™ from her home office in Baltimore.