I'm from the future

BCC (Before Current Career), I watched TV at lunch. Sue me.

Now I'm down to one day, Monday, and only when everything falls in place.

My appointment viewing: The Rockford Files, only the best show ever.

(No, I am not entertaining debate on the matter.)

The Rockford Files is a time capsule, as is Adam-12, Emergency! and those contemporary dramas I saw as a kid in the 1970s when Life Couldn't Possibly Get Any Better.

Through them, I get to revisit my California past, when I solved crimes, arrested bad guys and saved the nice old guy and his dog from their burning cantaloupe truck in the steep canyon.

Local cable stations push the drug of nostalgia on susceptible people like me, with a back-to-back diet of these shows on their minor channels.

There were times, I must confess, that lunch extended past Rockford and before I knew it, the final credits were rolling on Pete Malloy and Jim Reed and John Gage and Roy DeSoto, their police car and paramedic truck safely parked until the next episode.

I look past the plots to see the world of the 1970s, the flair collars and plaid sports coats, the explosive sideburns like my dad used to wear, the bell bottoms, and TV's cartoon version of worlds it didn't quite understand, like the counter-culture and organized crime and high school.

I love seeing logos for businesses that no longer exist (Esso gas stations!) and a Southern California that looks laughably uncrowded.

And the phones! Do you realize that humans used to share public phones in order to talk to one another, and operated them by depositing coins in special slots? No, I am not joking! Watch the shows for proof. Sometimes you had to wait in line to use these payphones, and people got testy.

Being from the future, I get frustrated watching these shows, for a reason I hadn't anticipated. I want to hand Jim Rockford my phone.

When the henchman from the New Jersey syndicate decides to move the millionaire's kidnapped daughter to a new hiding place, Rockford has to find a payphone to alert his worried client and convince him finally to call the police. Luckily these tricky plot changes happen within walking distance of a payphone, but vital minutes pass. If only he had a smart phone!

Of course, the overwrought millionaire/bad guy is taking the call from his car phone. That was TV's universal symbol of arrogance and power and evil, a carphone, the boat-anchor receiver attached to a ridiculously long twisty cord. That guy (it was always a guy) might be comfortable amid his rich Corinthian leather seating in his amply appointed limo, but he would always meet his comeuppance before the final credits.

Officers Reed and Malloy had their police radio, of course, and Adam-12 introduced viewers to "authentic" police dispatch chatter — "One Adam Twelve, One Adam Twelve, a Two-Eleven in Progress … One Adam Twelve, meet One Oh Nine on Tack Two." (Maybe it was malarkey, but since Jack Webb produced the show and he loved, loved, loved! cops, I'm going to say it was realish malarkey.)

But away from their cars, out on the mean streets of TV's Los Angeles, the officers were helpless — phoneless!

In one episode of Adam-12, Reed and Malloy checked out suspicious activity inside a store at night. They decided to park their car far down the street — away from their radio! — so they wouldn't tip off the Bad Guy with the Flashlight, wandering around inside.

Reed stayed in the front, Malloy went around to the back, where of course the Bad Guy tried to get away. Malloy wrestled Bad Guy to the ground, but another Bad Guy appeared. Matters had gotten out of hand! Reed ran around to the back but the second Bad Guy had gotten away!

"Get to a phone, Reed!" Malloy shouted. "We need backup!"

Get to a phone?! Are you kidding me? Standard LAPD issue must have included a sidearm, billy club and two dimes for the payphone. So Reed's got to run around in the dark for a payphone, hope it doesn't have a line in front of it already, and call for help.

I wanted so desperately to reach through time and hand him a phone. I'd probably have to show him how to use it. This Bad Guy would remain on the loose, but the next Bad Guy in the next episode wouldn't be so lucky.

I wonder: Did the world travel only so fast as the prevailing communication technology would let it? Did the second Bad Guy amble along in the knowledge that the pay phone was the fastest the police could move to chase him?

Though hardly a fan of new phones, I realize through these shows how much we take for granted. We went hours — days! — without other people knowing where we were. People didn't expect to know where we were. We called when we reached our destination. If our car broke down, well … geez, I forget what we did.

In the lonely outposts of TV world, characters had to ask permission to use a phone from the suspicious farmer, the harried gas station attendant or the corrupt but wily county sheriff.

They often had to call collect. Ask your elders.

Now everyone knows where everyone else is all the time, even in the lonely outposts. On TV, everyone has a phone, which becomes the story transporter. Tired of the scene? Make the phone ring, and the story goes instantly to whoever's calling. Plot line lagging? Pull out the phone and find out the lab results are in, another body has been found by the river, same M.O. Let's go!

The world moves faster, accordingly.

It's all good, I guess.

We can't go back, anyway. Last week, when I wasn't necessarily looking, I found a payphone in its Plexiglas®™ and metal frame, sitting on its pole against a building. As with all payphones, its innards had been ripped out.

Poor Reed and Malloy. Poor Rockford.

Thumb drive

"You just have to be 10 percent smarter than the machine," says Will, a friend and fellow former Scout leader.

He has said this many times.

Or maybe I have just heard it many times.

Maybe Will has intuited the futility of this particular man against the machines.

Machines are winning.

The latest machine might deliver me the death blow.

I got a smart phone. Yeah, a dumb guy got a smart phone.

Playing hard-to-get with technology, I'm typically the last on my block or my continent to embrace these Tools of Amazing Convenience,™® Doing Things I Never Thought Possible or Even Necessary In Any Measurable Way!©®

I derided such devices as Whiz Bangs. "Get out your Whiz Bang," I'd say to my son. "Tell me where China Beach is from here."

A Whiz Bang of my own finally seemed necessary. At least that's what we're telling ourselves. I need it to conduct business remotely, since I'll be going to a job job but keeping my old job. The family, each of whom has embraced smart phones with something approaching ecstacy (meaning they might actually have affixed the free Apple®™ logo sticker on something others might see), has felt sorry for me.

They have all been helpful. Maura handled the basics, setting up the phone, taking me through "on" and "off" and "volume" and "lock" and "charger," and how none of this is possible without opposable thumbs.

Nancy has shown me some features while driving, but we shouldn't have been doing that so I won't mention it here.

Liam has been trying to solve remotely why my emails won't send from the phone, and how I can schedule my blog to post regularly and link it to a facebook®™ status update.

Which is the only reason I really need a smart phone.

I gave up my flip phone and accomplished all that seemed useful with it. Over the last four years I had moved through the Five Stages of Mobile Phone:

Indifference: I know I have a phone. I don't know where it is. I don't want to look for it. It's always bleating to be recharged. How do I make it stop bleating?

Empathy: My loved ones would like me to find my phone. They think it's a fine idea that I keep track of the phone so they can communicate with me.

Dawn of Man: I answer phone calls ("Are you there?! I can't hear you very well." "Well, neither can I!" "What?!") and learn to text, beginning with several months of the repeated opus, "k." My loved ones learn to frame statements and questions that can be answered with "k."

Renaissance Man: I can type "ok."

Acceptance: I text like a mad fool. My thumb can leap tall buildings.

I had come to love the cumbersome way to text with a flip phone, in which I have to press a keypad button a certain number of times to produce a certain letter, number or punctuation mark.

I got quite good at it, and the more I did it, the more it appealed to my vestigial childhood wonder about cyphers and codes and spies and secrets. They intermix with the wonder of magic and sleight of hand, and American Top 40®™ and animation and paleontology.

I have daydreamed in the last few weeks about a secret code based on my flip phone — a symbol for the position of the keypad button, say, and another symbol for the number of times to press the button,  equals a letter number of punctuation. Probably no punctuation; or maybe sometimes, to throw off the enemy.

How robust would such a code be? Probably not very. I wonder if anyone has made such a code.

I'm right back in third grade, writing notes in lemon juice to send to my childhood friend Lance, who would have to carefully pass the paper over a light bulb to burn the juice traces into visibility. (Owing to the shrinking supply of incandescent bulbs, lemon juice may come back in vogue as a spy medium.)

We each had plastic cards from Pop Tarts™® boxes, the cards incised with symbols. Trace the symbols in certain orders on paper to create messages, the meaning of the symbols known only to Lance and me. And anyone who ate Pop Tarts™.

Typing on the new phone is not code-like. It's foreign and unwieldy, my thumb pressing around every onscreen letter but the one I want. I am saved, grudgingly, by the predictive spelling feature which saves a lot of pressing and guessing.

But I press and slide and tap and double-tap, and pitch and spread my fingers and watch the images slide and bounce like cartoon characters at my sorcerer's gestures, and wonder at this technology, new to me, common to you.

Here's the thing, though: The phone is big. Bigger than my wallet. A phone is my watch, real watches falling off my wrist too frequently when the sweat of my arms saws through leather wristbands.

The flip phone fit in the palm of my hand, and I could hide it without too much trouble when leading a tour of the Old Sacramento Underground. I could direct visitors one way, turn the other and palm my phone out of my costume apron: OK, I'm right on time.

The new phone feels like I'm pulling a surfboard out of my pocket, and looks just as subtle. Tour visitors are going to wonder what the dude in 19th century duds is doing with this otherworldly device spilling out of his hands. (He is just trying to learn the time; look over there, please.)

I have no particular need for the phone 99 percent of the time. I take it out with me to lunch, checking facebook®™ (you can fall far behind if you're not vigilant, which you know). I have even taken photos with the phone. I have even found where the photos are that I have taken.

Yesterday I pushed myself to the technological zenith: Before finishing a three-mile swim, I climbed out onto the far shore of Lake Natoma, took a photo, called up the Internet, checked the water temperature, posted my swim on facebook®™ to other swimmers, and attached the photo — all before I had even finished the swim — and then got back in the water to reach the dock and my car.

In the old days I went home, post about the swim — no photo — sometimes hours after the fact.

No more. A new era has dawned.

The phone sits at my elbow as I type, a black obelisk as imposing and mysterious as in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It holds unimaginable power, untold wealth of capabilities and conveniences.

I sense its urge of obligation, like The Ring to Bilbo. I won't see the masses, together but alone, gazing down into their machines anymore … because I'll become one of them.

Ummm.

Maybe tomorrow. Although: What time is it?