I'm a Stranger Here Myself Read Online Free PDF Page B

Chicago Cubs. But they can’t go because that would spoil their custom of never going. It is an irreconcilable paradox.
    You see what I mean when I say that it is not easy being a baseball fan?

The other day I called my computer helpline, because I needed to be made to feel ignorant by someone much younger than me, and the boyish-sounding person who answered told me he required the serial number on my computer before he could deal with me.
    “And where do I find that?” I asked warily.
    “It’s on the bottom of the CPU functional dysequilibrium unit,” he said, or words of a similarly confounding nature.
    This, you see, is why I don’t call my computer helpline very often. We haven’t been talking four seconds and already I can feel a riptide of ignorance and shame pulling me out into the icy depths of Humiliation Bay. Any minute now, I know with a sense of doom, he’s going to ask me how much RAM I have.
    “Is that anywhere near the TV-screen thingy?” I ask helplessly.
    “Depends. Is your model the Z-40LX Multimedia HPii or the ZX46/2Y Chromium B-BOP?”
    And so it goes. The upshot is that the serial number for my computer is engraved on a little metal plate on the bottom of the main control box—the one with the CD drawer that is kind of fun to open and shut. Now call me an idealistic fool, but if I were going to put an identifying number on every computer I sold and then require people to regurgitate that number each time they wanted to communicate with me, I don’t believe I would put it in a place that required the user to move furniture and get the help of a neighbor each time he wished to consult it. However, that is not my point.
    My model number was something like CQ124765900-03312-DiP/22/4. So here is my point:
Why?
Why does my computer need a number of such breathtaking complexity? If every neutrino in the universe, every particle of matter between here and the farthest wisp of receding Big Bang gas somehow acquired a computer from this company there would still be plenty of spare numbers under such a system.
    Intrigued, I began to look at all the numbers in my life, and nearly every one of them was absurdly excessive. My Visa card number, for instance, has thirteen digits. That’s enough for almost two trillion potential customers. Who are they trying to kid? My Budget Rent-a-Car card has no fewer than seventeen digits. Even my local video store appears to have 1.9 billion customers on its rolls (which may explain why
L.A. Confidential
is always out).
    The most impressive by far is my Blue Cross/Blue Shield medical card, which not only identifies me as No. YGH475907018 00 but also as a member of Group 02368. Presumably, then, each group has a person in it with the same number as mine. You can almost imagine us having reunions.
    Now all this is a long way of getting around to the main point of this discussion, which is that one of the great, great improvements in American life in the last twenty years is the advent of phone numbers that any fool can remember.
    A long time ago people realized that you could remember numbers more easily if you relied on the letters rather than the numbers. In my hometown of Des Moines, for instance, if you wanted to call time, the official number was 244-5646, which of course no one could handily recall. But if you dialed BIG JOHN you got the same number, and
everybody
could remember BIG JOHN (except, curiously, my mother, who was a bit hazy on the Christian name part, and so generally ended up asking the time of complete strangers whom she had just woken, but that’s another story).
    Now, of course, every business has a 1-800 number— 1-800-FLY TWA or 244-GET PIZZA or whatever. Not many changes in the past two decades have made life immeasurably better for simple folk like me, but this unquestionably has.
    Now here is my big idea. I think we should all have one number for everything. Mine naturally would be 1-800-BILL. This number would do for everything—it would