Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, September 12, 1993                   TAG: 9309100024
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-2   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: STEVE KARK
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

LIKE OLD RIP, HAVE I MISSED SOMETHING?

Like Rip Van Winkle, I awoke from an afternoon nap to find that everybody else has gone on ahead without me.

Here's what I mean:

The phone company sends me this letter offering a new service.

From now on I don't have to worry about those just-missed calls, like when I'd rushed in from the yard only to have the phone stop ringing seconds before I reached it.

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, now all I have to do is punch in a couple of numbers and the phone company will automatically redial the last caller for me.

No more mad dashes through the yard.

No more shin-bruising trips up the back steps.

What is it about a ringing telephone anyway that makes us drop everything and run so desperately to answer it?

Have we all been conditioned to respond like so many Pavlovian dogs?

Is this what technology has done to us?

More and more I've begun to wonder if the calls are worth that kind of effort.

You see, the technology that makes this little service possible is the same technology that makes phone soliciting so commonplace these days.

I ask you, how many times have you interrupted a meal so you could rush to the phone and be asked whether you've considered buying new storm windows this year?

Or new siding?

Or any number of things that are sold over the phone these days?

Well, I've heard all that and more. They always seem to call during mealtime. That's bad enough, but it's not the most irritating part. That comes when you realize that the person on the other end of the line is reading to you from a prepared text.

And reading it poorly at that.

Nothing sets me on edge faster than having someone read to me over the phone. Where do they get these people? Too often it is done in a voice without character or tone. It is speech without a human presence.

Conversation is hardly the goal in that situation. Instead, the caller has become a humanoid drone, trained to react a certain preprogrammed way to every response I might offer, which doesn't say much for my role if I sit and listen when I feel it demeans us both.

It's gotten bad enough that I expect every call to be from another of these readers. I dread answering the phone. We are being invaded by those who are able to mimic our words but are unable to give them life.

This has caused other problems as well. Friends and family who call don't always identify themselves. They quite naturally assume that I'll recognize their voices.

Well, sometimes I don't. And regrettably until I do, I expect the worst and my tone is sometimes less than cordial. "What are you selling?" I might ask.

Under these circumstances you can imagine how embarrassing it can be, after a long pause on the other end, to hear, "We wondered if you were doing anything this weekend, but maybe this isn't a good time."

Oh, I don't have a bone to pick with the phone company. I know that it's simply trying to make phone-calling as convenient as possible.

Unfortunately, though, it seems that my phone is a lot more convenient to the bad readers than it is to me. It's as though the phone belongs to them now.

Perhaps I am living in the past. I can remember when the telephone was always the voice of friend and family, when I made more calls than I received. I rushed to answer the phone because I knew that a friend was waiting on the other end.

But no more. More often than not the voices on the other end will be strangers. They want a piece of my time. They want money.

Like ol' Rip, have I missed something? Why must we be so constantly accessible, our lives so open to interruption? Has everyone else accepted this Brave New World of pocket pagers, car phones and instantaneous redialing?

Is it really so terrible to miss a phone call every once in a while when so many are unwanted?

Has privacy lost so much value?

Steve Kark is an instructor at Virginia Tech and a correspondent for the Roanoke Times & World-News. He writes from his home in scenic Rye Hollow, in a remote part of Giles County south of Pearisburg.