The Conversion of Edwin

I'm mad at the Hershey company. I have been for several years.

The Hershey's Milk Chocolate bar was once packaged in a foil wrapper with a paper slip cover over it. The design was simple, but classic. And when I say classic, I mean that it was the same basic packaging they'd been using since 1912.

As a fan of the product, I was impressed. Hershey stuck to it's guns even when all the other candy bars were coming out with gaudy, glossy wrappers. Twix, for instance, used to come in a dull, tan wrapper that had this weird "soft" way of tearing open. But then Mars changed it to the shiny, gold wrapper that's used today.

That was in 1997.

I know that because I remember the first shiny one I bought.

I got it from a vending machine in my building. I didn't notice the change until after I picked it up from behind the magic trap door, ever valiant defender of the vending machine industry. I was let down, somehow so hurt at this unnecessary alteration. On the way back to my room, a girl held the elevator for me.

"Is that some special kind of Twix?!"

"No . . . no it's a regular Twix. They . . . they just changed the wrapper."

" . . . oh"

She was let down too! I felt so bad for her. One moment excited about a limited-time variation on her favorite cookie bars. The next deflated, defeated. And I had to be the one to tell her.

But it wasn't like that with Hershey's. Oh no. Foil. Paper slip cover. Done.

I like to imagine that there was once a big board meeting in Hershey, PA, at a 50 foot table in front of a chocolate waterfall, where some young snot suggested they change the Milk Chocolate Bar wrapper.

"It's so boring! And why is it brown! Let's talk to the ad guys, see if they can come up with something that will appeal more to kids! Like a bright, glossy red, and 'Hershey's' written so it looks like it's breaking through a sheet of glass!"

Then there was a long silence. And the president, an older gentleman who I'm choosing to believe was named Edwin Hershey, looked down past the whole table of executives to the security guard by the door. The security guard was the same age as President Hershey, in fact they started work on the same day and still played golf together, and he quietly put his newspaper under his chair. All the execs looked down at the table and fiddled with their pens while the guard's footsteps echoed past the first 25 feet of table.

"Sir, I'm going to need you to come with me."

And no one at the company ever saw that guy again. He probably works for Hydrox now.

But it didn't last. In 2003, Hershey's finally changed to a plastic wrapper. I was very disappointed in them. Still am.

Isn't that strange, though? How much we resist even the smallest changes? Or, at least, the changes we have no control over. That's the catch. No one buys a new car and starts yelling "I can't believe I'm driving this new car! The old one was a classic! What was wrong with the old one?!"

We don't fear change. We fear not being relevant. Realizing that difference gives you a new perspective on every old person, some of whom are as young as 18, who rant about how things are changing for the worse.

- "That song remake just isn't right" (Even though the original is still available.)

- "Movies aren't as good as they used to be" (Conveniently, they only remember the good old movies and forget about 'Monster A Go-Go')

- "Robots are everywhere, and someday they're going to take over" (This one is actually true, I humbly welcome our positronic masters.)

I think about these things whenever I catch myself maligning some trivial passage. If I can rid myself of "the way things ought to be", maybe I won't get old. Not really.*

*This does not excuse the Hershey company.

"Stone"-forged indeed

I imagine that somewhere in the internet there's a small, clandestine organization, one who's sole purpose is to combine popular brand names with curse words and drug references. It's the creative powerhouse that turned Microsoft into Microsux or, better yet Micro$ux.

But the organization's best work has always been in the video game field: Playstation - Gaystation, Xbox360 - Xsux Three-sh*tty, etc. Now, Nintendo tried to undercut these renamers, figuring that these flame-war arms dealers would by stumped by a crazy word like "Wii". It was a fine effort on Nintendo's part, but "Wii-tarded" was coined mere hours later.

If this group does exist, I have to believe that they have an entire division dedicated to adding the word "crack" into the name of every persistent online game. Everquest? Evercrack. Asheron's Call? Asheron's Crack. World of Warcraft? World of Warcrack. And so on.

The idea behind these combinations is solid enough. People seem to get "addicted" to online role-playing, so why not blend the games with a horrible, life-destroying drug for comedy magic?

But I've come to realize that this crack association is entirely wrong. Massively Multiplayer Online games are NOT CRACK.

They are pot.

And I can prove it.

Consider the following, plugging either "pot" or "World of Warcraft" into the blanks.

1. Your friends who are involved with ___ swear that it's non-addictive, even though it's the only thing they seem to want to do or talk about.

2. Every normal activity now has to include ___ in some way, whether it's a party, trip, dinner, funeral, etc.

3. Once someone starts with ___, he quickly gains a new group of friends that you aren't a part of. You are constantly encouraged to try ___, even if it's just so you can socialize with the group.

4. These new circles have their own set of lingo regarding ___ which no one else understands. And nothing is funnier to them than if you, God forbid, misuse some trivial piece of their dumbass terminology.

5. After some real exposure to ___ "enthusiasts", you realize that the danger of ___ is not that it's directly destructive, but that it makes people ok with the idea of sitting around all day.

6. Certain ___ people are constantly surprised that you aren't into ___, especially if you "seem like the kind of person who would be into ___".

7. Those same people always want to know your reasons for not trying ___. Your reasons are somehow never valid, and "if you'd just try ___ you'd understand."

8. There are friends that you used to have who are now too busy with ___ to ever hang out. These friends are always saying how they miss you, and wish you'd come be a part of their ___ friends so they could see you again, as though you should feel guilty that THEY chose the game over YOU.

The one with the awkward moment

The thing is, it has to happen.

You can't just fly around all the time catching airplanes and stopping giant meteors and lifting overturned cars without it happening. Even if the only thing he did was walk around Metropolis all day, it would still happen every once in a while.

So what does the guy do, zip home to Mom every time so she can take care of it? He doesn't have time for that. And it's not like he can go to a dry cleaner: "Hi, I need to umm . . . get this cleaned. Yeah. No, it's not mine, I uh . . . I ran into Superman outside and he, you know, he asked me if I could just drop it off for him. So I figured, since I was coming by here ANYway . . . I mean he's the 'Man of Steel', he saved like thirty people last week, seems like the least I could . . . look just put it under 'Kent', okay?"

See what I mean? He simply has to be doing it himself. There's no other way. It must be part of his routine, just like stopping runaway trains or catching missiles in mid-air.

But how weird would it be to catch him at it? To walk in on Superman ironing his cape? Just standing there in his living room, wearing the suit. Probably with a rerun of "Friends" on in the background. And he looks up at you with this expressionless face, because it's totally normal to him. You'd be staring blankly, trying to reconcile the superhero who burned a hole though a bank vault yesterday using only his eyes with this dude in front of you who hadn't sorted the pile of socks on his couch yet.

What do you think he would he say? What would you say? I imagine there'd be this weird, awkward silence for a minute. Then finally Superman would yell "WHAT, it gets wrinkled!?", just like he'd practiced it in his head every time he got out the spray starch. And almost immediately you'd come back with "noIknow! I'msureitdoes!". Then it'd be quiet again for a second while you tried to think of a segue out.

"Aaaaaanyway, sooooo good luck with that I guess. And uhhh, don't use too much starch! Heh. Uh." *crickets* "And yeah, I'm gonna go . . . take care of some things. I guess I'll see you, ya know, FLYIN' around up there*. Ok. Bye."

*while waving your fingers around a little

*blink*

Armageddon came, but not the way we expected.

There was no nuclear war, no vast volcanic upheaval, not even so much as the courtesy of an alien invasion. It was a simple anomaly. A little glitch in the system that, because of just the right conditions, corrupted the whole of human civilization. Everything we'd built, everything we'd accomplished, everything we'd worked for, all of it. All of it lost. For nothing . . .

. . . just because Dave was trying trying to turn left out of a parking lot during rush hour.

People who turn left are a sort of innate problem to a right-laned society. The nature of a stop light is to manage straight-moving traffic from 2 different roads. People turning right have no problem in this setup, and in fact it's even easier for them since right turns can be made on red. Even though the stoplight system is really designed around straight-goers, the rightys have a sort of null effect and are allowed to work around the system. But left turners are another matter. Since they're trying to turn through the oncoming flow, a single lefty has to block everyone behind him until the conditions just happen to meet his needs. The only alternative to this is creating left-turn lanes, left-turn signals, and other such "special exceptions." People who turn left aren't a part of the system, they're jury-rigged into it.

When you try to turn left out of a parking lot where there's not even a stoplight to help, well, you're just taking humanity into your own hands.

You'd think that Dave would have figured it out after the first fifteen minutes. The stoplights on the road in front of him were releasing so much traffic that most of the street was constantly blocked. And when it did clear a little on one side or the other, he still had to deal with the occasional right-turner who came through either light. Then there was the parking lot across from him, just offset enough that he couldn't negotiate a simul-turn with the cars leaving it. If Dave had just realized how much time he was wasting, that he could have gotten home faster if he'd just been willing to take the slightly longer route, everything would have been fine.

But that's a thing with people. They can't deal with traveling ten feet to reach something that's only one foot in front of them, even if there's a brick wall in the way. They'd rather spend days trying to figure out a way through the wall.

So Dave sat there, and soon half the parking lot was full of cars waiting behind him. Even people who wanted to use the lot's other exit were out of luck, since many of them were blocked into their parking spaces by the waiting cars. The first fender accident didn't help things, and by 5:30 the lot was a hungry, honking mess.

No one was getting out of the lot, so no one was getting into it either. Unfortunately this didn't get noticed until one car was already half turned in, unable to move forward but still blocking the street. I suppose the blocked street wouldn't have been so bad if it weren't rush hour, and if the final game of the World Series wasn't scheduled for that night, 5 blocks away. From there it was pure snowball effect toward the End. One blocked road under those conditions meant a dozen more were frozen. The problem grew exponentially, until the entire city was shut down along with both of the major interstates that passed through it. And since the city was the major aeronautical hub for a whole section of the country, the airport was soon backed up with travelers who couldn't get cab rides. We were nearly saved from total destruction when the president ordered the planes to simply take all those people home and make them return later, but no one wanted to do it. Again, that "one foot away, ten feet of wall" problem.

The airlines were stressed from the loss of a major port, the roadways were crippled by the then-epic traffic jam, and no one was particularly happy about the World Series being called off. The snowball was rolling. A year later, somewhere in the rubble, Dave's blinker was still on.

Flying Cars

U-scan waits quietly at your local supermarket, a living symbol of societal unrest.

I like to imagine that some forgotten 1950's "World of Tomorrow" article included a story on self-checkout, and how it would someday revolutionize the way we buy things. In my mind, the article includes an elaborate drawing of happy customers zipping though "payment pods" while a single employee conducts their purchases from his trusty "hover-dome". Everyone in this picture is wearing shiny, silver clothes and the hover-dome appears to be steam-powered.

Fast-forward to a few years ago, and I can see the same picture made into sliding points of an executive's presentation:

-Increase customer satisfaction by providing faster checkout for low-item purchases
-Raise profits though cost-efficient use of personnel
-Embiggened consumer awareness toward shiny pants

Words like "wifi", "secure-id", and "HD-ready" would be sprinkled in there, too.

I wonder about that executive and his giant list of securito-tech-fi sentence fragments. And I wonder about that 1950's magazine artist drawing little armies of future-happy-white-people. And I wonder what they'd each have to say about the idiot in front of me in line right now.

At least I think he's ahead of me in line. It's hard to tell. See, he's pushed his shopping cart so that it's perfectly side-on to the U-scan aisle, just far enough that the front of it partially blocks the "Stop here and wait" graphic on the floor. And he's turned away so he can browse the tabloid rack, which is why I can't see if he's even looking for an open U-scan register, or just idly standing there. So there's no way to determine if he's even a part of this whole "line" thing, or if he's just really that interested in Ben Affleck. Either way, he doesn't seem to care that he's causing a societal roadblock. This, apparently, is the person who's been buying "Us Weekly".

But even Mr. Side-on isn't quite as bad as the guy who has formed his own line at U-scan station number 1. What's his problem anyway? Is it that he doesn't understand the idea of one line feeding into four registers? Did he think the rest of us were waiting for something else? I'd hate to believe that he just figured no one would call him on jumping ahead. Ah well, the joke's on him anyway. While I'm next in line for any of the other three registers, he's waiting behind a woman who doesn't seem to have bought anything, anywhere, ever before. She keeps looking at the register in an exasperated "why are you doing this to me?" way. It's such an abundantly emotional reaction toward a piece of technology that I can almost hear her complaining about "the internets" as soon as she gets home.

Technology, as a study, is defined as "the application of tools to solve problems." It's a good definition, but I think it downplays the roll that people play in the technology equation. Tools don't get applied on their own. For a tool to be used, there has to be a user. That human element, the implied applier, makes technology a more fundamentally humanistic study than most people would ever imagine.

Consider your cell phone. It seems like a tool that solves a problem, the problem of transmitting audio remotely. But that's not exactly true. Making a device that simply "transmits audio remotely" would be easy to do. It wouldn't require that the device be small, or have an address book (plus a memory chip to store the entries), or a back-lit display, or a call-timer. Those features are all dedicated to the user experience. Most of the cell phone in your pocket, it's resources, power, design, and interface, are focused on you and the tool, not the tool and the problem. The closer you look at technology, the more you realize that it's about people more than anything else.

Enter the Title

I feel like much of my life is an ongoing struggle between myself and the person I was a few days ago. I call him "past-Sam", and he is my nemesis!

Past-Sam represents everything I'm not. While I have big dreams and ambitions, he's lazy and unmotivated. Where I believe in cleanliness, he's a slob. While I care, he doesn't.

And I'm not trying to say that I know how someone else should live his life. I'm more than willing to let past-Sam go his own way. But there's a problem. See, past-Sam never has to deal with the consequences of his mistakes. He does whatever he wants with full knowledge that it's me, not him, who will suffer.

Past-Sam is a jerk.

Let me give you an example. Lets say I come up with some brilliant plan or ambitious goal. I think about all the possibilities, and get excited about all the benefits and rewards. But then days, sometimes even weeks later, I'll return to my carefully-laid design to see how things are progressing. And how much work has been done? Nothing. Nothing at all. Past-Sam hasn't come up with the font for the title of the outline for my idea.

See, apparently past-Sam needs a certain amount of "chill-time" to make it through an average day, and this makes it difficult for him to accomplish much.

And it's not bad enough that past-Sam doesn't do any work, oh no. He even gets in the way of my productivity. How am I supposed to get anything done when I'm constantly tired and run-down? Past-Sam knows what time I get up, so why does he stay awake until two every night? I have to suffer every morning just because he wanted to watch a rerun of "Scrubs." (Usually an episode that he's seen at least thirty times) I think the sleepiness is even worse because I don't get enough nutrition. And why don't I get enough nutrition? Past-Sam. Do you know how hard it is to lose weight when past-Sam keeps buying packages of Oreos? I have all these calories to work off, and I don't even get any Oreos out of it. Jerk eats ALL of them.

Between sleep deprivation and poor diet, I usually feel so bad that I need a certain amount of "chill-time" to even make it through the day.

But all is not lost. Over time I've developed ways to combat past-Sam. The key to it, I've found, is forcing him into situations where he has no choice but to change. I don't know the number of times I resolved to exercise more, only to have past-Sam not follow through. But when I signed him up for a class, things started to happen. Suddenly it wasn't a vague notion of what he was supposed to be doing, it was a schedule and a commitment. Past-Sam might not like to work, but give him a deadline and he'll produce.

And that is how I came up with the name for this blog.