If cars could talk

Wait a minute … now they do

I grew up in the last, maybe the second last, generation of life as everyone knew it since the beginning of humankind.

Whether we’ve been on the biblical calendar or the evolutionary calendar we’ve all been doing things pretty much the same way for a long, long time. Ages. Eons.

Until now.

I can’t figure out what’s going on half the time. It’s like I landed on a new planet. Half the time I think, well I’ll be gone in a few years anyway. But then I love to call for Chinese food from my cell phone too at the end of a hockey game.

I grew up in a company house in Glace Bay where the first one up had to make the fires, one in the fireplace and one in the coal stove. Cooking on a coal stove was uncomplicated though. Basically you had hot and not. Would I go back to that? Yeahhh … no.

Now I pick up the remote to watch TV and the heat comes on. Wrong remote. Got a remote for the thermostat, the TV, the car, the camera, the drapes, the lights, the cat.

So many remotes, I’m afraid to hit “Power.” I might be ordering something online.

I feel remote myself. Lost. Puzzled. Is this heaven or hell? No, it’s just 2018 and rising. I grew up in a neighbourhood that was our world. We didn’t venture out of it much as kids. I did a little, as I had to go to Caledonia School in … well … Caledonia … beyond my Passchendaele home. Everybody else went to St. Anthony’s School. Which made me a bit of an ambassador. I had friends on the outside. I could walk through distant lands without papers.

But now kids grow up with friends in other neighbourhoods, other towns, other countries. Local kids play video games with kids in Switzerland. And cars talk to you. “You okay? Everything alright?”

One night we came home from a Screaming Eagles game and a police car was in our yard. Oi. Not good.

We blanched and gave up a “What the…!!!” and ran up the driveway while the car kept going up the road like Forrest Gump’s shrimp boat without us.

But the police officer came motioning us to calm down. Everything was alright. And a, let’s say seniority-rich family member was smiling and waving too.

This was shortly after the seniority-rich members got a new car. But this car was REALLY NEW and had a button on it one mistook for a dome light switch. Shortly after hitting the dome light switch and the dome light not coming on, the members heard a disembodied voice, a pleasant, calm, reassuring yet compelling voice asking, “Are you alright? Have you been in an accident?”

Well, having never spoken to a car before, except on a oneway basis over a busted radiator, a frozen door lock or a seized lug nut on a flat tire, they got out and went into the house and made tea.

I’d hope to do the same thing. Loose lips sink ships! It’s always been my philosophy, one which I find as a columnist especially impossible to heed, that states if you don’t know what to say, say nothing. Taciturn to the end, that’s what they said. After which the police arrived.

Yeah.

This is it.

We’ve gone from getting oranges for Christmas, thanks to the development of roads and cars, to cars that ask you how you are.

Anyway. It’s probably good that the seniority-rich members were home when the conversation began. If they’d been on say the highway the car might have pulled itself over, turned itself off and locked the doors, before calling the cops.

Then it would’ve been on. Humanity vs Machinery. Literally.

Ladies and Gentlemen … welcome to the main event.