Our brains do die

Last night my brain died. Then things got weird.

I rely on my electronic brain and the computers I use at work and at home.

Before our family entered the digital age, I had a paper appointment/address/notebook. We lived in Kentucky at the time.

We bought our first real computer around 1990. Before that we had a word processor that did limited database work. It was a Radio Shack Color Computer with a whopping 32 thousand characters of memory. By comparison, the computer I am working at now has 384 million characters of memory. My biological brain has about 5,000 characters of memory on a good day. So, I rely on tools to remind me of where I am supposed to be on what day.

I am not the only one with this problem.

Former President Gerald Ford was campaigning for the 1976 election by taking a train whistle stop tour one weekend.

As you can imagine, he stopped at every small town along the train route. That was in the days before rail banking turned all the railroad tracks into house lots and public trails. So, the President of the United States can be forgiven if he wasn’t always sure what town he was in.
One of those stops was Lincoln, Ill., where I was living at the time.

He greeted the crowd with enthusiasm.

“Hi, everybody!” he yelled.

“Hi, Mr. President!” several shouted back.

“Gee, it’s great to be here in Peoria!” he said.

In the digital age, a computer in someone’s pocket makes sure the President knows where he is.

When we lived in Kentucky, when high tech meant getting more than three stations on cable TV, I lived out of a paper day planner notebook. I not only used it for my appointments, but to schedule blocks of time to do what I wanted to accomplish, to keep track of the names and addresses of everyone I had met since becoming an adult; and it had a plastic page with pockets designed to hold my credit card, driver’s license and other papers.

True to the Star Trek ideal, I carried nearly nothing in my pants pockets. (Trekkies will remember the Enterprise crew wore fanny packs. Their pants had no pockets.)

Then, one day, I went to the store. I arrived home to find my brain was missing! Including my credit card and driver’s license!

I called the police. Fortunately, my paper brain had been picked up along the roadway by a good samaritan who turned it into the police station.
I had laid my notebook on top of our minivan while I fished my car keys out of my pocket. The book rode on top of the van very well for nearly three blocks before falling to the right side of the road, away from traffic.

After that incident, I began carrying a wallet and using the pockets in my pants.

While working at a newspaper in another city, I bought an electronic notebook that held so much more information than my paper book. It also synchronized with our computer at home, so if I lost the electronic book, I would still have my data at home. Plus, my wife, Linda, could follow my schedule and have access to the hundreds of people we had met but hadn’t seen or spoken to in years. After all, we may want to write them, someday.

All went well until last night.

I turned on my Palm electronic brain and nothing happened. It was dead!

It has a little battery gauge on the screen, but the last time I looked at it, I had nearly half the battery life left.

I couldn’t sleep! Memories of the horrible loss of my paper brain came back to me.

I checked the Internet and someone with a similar problem said my Palm might have an open capacitor! I would have to send my brain in to be fixed by strangers! I don’t want strangers looking into my brain!

Refusing to panic, I fell asleep for the rest of the night.

This morning, I put my brain into my pocket and stopped at the grocery store I thought would be open at 6:30 a.m. to buy new batteries. The store was closed!

I came into work, helped put out the newspaper, had a quick staff meeting and then went to buy batteries for my brain, hoping against hope it would live again!

And it did!

What on earth did people do before they had electronic brains? No wonder the stock market crashed in 1929.