New Experiences

Douglas Adams, the author of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, offered the following definition of progress.

1. Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Nora and I are in the midst of new experiences, and each finding several parts of it to be against the natural order of things.  I like to think of myself as a storyteller and an intuitive thinker, but Nora says I'm analytical, and she's always right, so I'm analytical.  I do like spreadsheets and sudoku puzzles and pool.  And so I'm comfortable with things like calculating interest and payments and making little Excel algorithms in which you change one variable and that changes the calculations in thirty other cells so that you can do rapid comparisons. 

Spreadsheets came into my life in a meaningful way when I was 30 years old. I had a 1988 summer internship with the Berkeley Solar Group in which I spent three months developing a massive spreadsheet program that would convert data entered from field visits to houses into a file type called a CSV that you could feed into an energy simulation program.  [I hear you snoring out there, but it wrecked my eyesight, so pay attention.]  I spent the entire summer hunched over a "portable" Compaq computer that never left my desk because it weighed 34 pounds.  It had a tiny black CRT monitor with green text, and I was trying to build a spreadsheet that was over 200 columns wide and about 500 rows tall.  And, because Steve Jobs hadn't finished stealing the computer mouse from Xerox yet, I navigated the whole thing using arrow keys

The monitor was about the size of the screen on an iPhone, which people seem to like, but just for movies and Angry Birds and stuff.  Try doing a 100,000-cell spreadsheet on your iPhone.  If you're old enough, you'll know what I mean when I tell you it ran on a 286 Turbo processor.  If you're not old enough, then...

Anyway, spreadsheets — and the things you do on them, like budgets and finances and schedules and higher-ed assessment projects — are old hat for me, because I encountered them in the "Adams Zone" between 15 and 35.  But Nora finds them mystical, which is kind of cool because I get to do what seem like magic tricks.

On the other hand, I had a very simple childhood and young adulthood.  I never had more than a few dollars at a time, so whenever I wanted to buy something, I went to the store, looked at the price, paid that price, took it home and used it.  The whole notion of "customer service" was a misnomer, because the customer transaction was so straightforward:  see it – buy it – take it home.  If it was broken, you took it back and they gave you one that wasn't.

Nora, on the other hand, came from New York, where there are so many businesses that they have to differentiate themselves somehow.  So negotiating prices and dealing with customer service people was part of her Adams Zone in a way that wasn't true for me.  She certainly doesn't enjoy spending hours on the phone with the computer technicians, but she's extraordinarily good at it.  For me, I dislike it so much that I'm more than willing to give up a couple of hundred dollars and just start over rather than deal with the headaches and awkwardness.  I didn't have any of that in my life until I was well past the Adams threshold, and I find it unnatural.

Between the two of us, we get most things done remarkably well.  But half of what each one of us does mystifies the other.