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

DATE: MONDAY, April 24, 1995                   TAG: 9504250013
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

PHONES WERE FRIENDLIER BACK IN THE OLD DAYS

One reason I'm glad to be along in years is my recent discovery of Viginia Western Community College's telephone registration plan.

I suspect Newt would love this, but it strikes terror in the hearts of certain simple persons who try daily to forget about the information highway. It's odd that Newt does the same thing for these unfortunate people.

You can now pick up the Newtophone, er, that is, telephone and punch in your classes and pay for them at the same time.

I would rather go over there and present my real body to another real body for registration. That's what I did 50 years ago at Roanoke College.

(Yeah, smart person. We had phones then and they were a lot friendlier than they are today.)

Roanoke College sent me this letter - written on a manual, upright, non-electric typewriter - that said I could enroll if I agreed to make up this math deficiency I had.

I suppose today at Virginia Western, I'd push star-plus-seven or something like that to indicate that I was totally ignorant of algebra, geometry and long division.

There were no buttons at Roanoke. They put my duffle bag in the trunk of a car and took me to this fashionable apartment on Union Street that I shared with a mathematical genius from Covington; a Yankee from Bergen County, N.J., and this guy from Florida who drove a taxi nights and slept in the daytime with his eyes open.

If a phone had been handy, I probably would've made a collect call and asked my mother to come get me.

I don't want to be an old fogey about this, but it seems to me this telephone business is going to ruin higher education.

For example, I guess you could take the easy way out and press star-two-seven to explain to the dean why you'd cut your last three 8 a.m. classes in remedial algebra.

I had to go in and explain face-to-face that my alarm clock was broken. And the dean said that if I was serious about higher education, I'd better go down to Rose's and buy a new one.

I assume you can press a button, and do some other things I probably wouldn't understand, to drop a class - which in my case would be remedial algebra.

In closing, I gotta say that anybody smart enough to register by phone probably doesn't need college.