"What We Have Here Is a Failure to Communicate!"

The new air filtering appliances come with a set of incomprehensible instructions. Written probably by a tech writer who first language is not English, they have omitted description or designation such as a model number, such that the actual filter components or their replacements cannot be obtained without multiple trips to the Wal-Mart where the original appliances and their filter components were purchased. At the sector of the Wal-Mart where the appliances were purchased, no one can be found who knows anything about the merchandise they are selling there, certainly not these air filters – which, of course, were made in China.

With purchase of a back up power system for my computer, I run into an infuriating scenario almost identical to that of the air filters, in this case a word-salad of incomprehensible, convolute gibberish masquerading as instructions. When I called the number provided, I got a "messenger" set-up and "you type, I type" conversation with a guy who obviously wasn't good at that sort of thing, at all. Only with atomistic sentences like, "How many wires go from the hard drive to the back-up?" did I get enough information with which to proceed, inasmuch as mention of a particular cable providing communication between the device itself and the hard drive of the computer have been totally omitted from the instructions. It’s not there. You’re just supposed to KNOW that, I guess.

Changing residence recently and unable to procure cable hook-up similar to that which we had formerly with CMA, we find ourselves relegated to a dial-up arrangement provided by Verizon. The “hook-up’ swiftly becomes yet another nightmare of the kind I’m talking about. Beginning with the “If you want to speak English, press one” and the rest of maddeningly obvious admission that the multi-millionaires with whom we have somehow been forced to associate – even do business with – care far more about profits than about service, I spend hours (six, all total, and as a matter of fact) on the telephone, talking to one person after another who obviously knows almost nothing about her job or the product for which she might otherwise be expected to provided service.

Again and again and again we are first obliged to wait long minutes (in one instance sixteen – we kept time) while the individual to whom we are speaking located another who supposedly had the answer to our question - then didn’t. After literally hours (I wasn’t kidding back there at the outset), we were delivered to a technician able to provide the instructions required. That, mind you, is not evidence that the latter knows his job thoroughly; it just so happens that our problem happened – at long last – to be one with which he was familiar. In the six – perhaps it was eight – other instances, that wasn’t the case.

These days, to call anyone on the telephone looking for the solution to any kind of problem, now matter how simple, is like groping in a tool box in the dark for a tool you need.

A short time – less than a week - after arriving here in Port Lavaca, my school teacher wife, Rita, realized that the duct work in the building where she teaches is infested with black mold. When the violent allergic reaction to the stuff hit her, we were obliged this soon to call a doctor. Obviously, having just arrived here, we were obliged to repair quickly to the telephone book, call, and request instructions for direction to the office. People at the school – teachers, mind you – couldn’t help, incidentally.

Once the number had been called, you’ve guessed it. If you’re like me, you’ve encountered dozens of times the local who doesn’t seem to know – can’t tell you, anyway - where he lives or works. Now, the distance from our house to the doctor’s office proves subsequently to be less than a mile. It also turns out that Doctor Lee isn’t the only Doctor Lee in the area immediate to our final destination. The second spells his name “Le.” He, or she, isn’t an American (surprise!).

Accompanied by a woman literally gasping for breath, on a cellular phone with another woman – one who can’t for the life of her tell us where she is by means of address, names of streets, distances, references to landmarks (she doesn’t recognize the term “landmark”) - I struggle with question after question (especially after I have spotted the name “Le” on a door in the strip mall nearby) to find my way. A stop at a “Medical Center” office two hundred feet distant from the place for which we’re searching takes me to two offices in the same building where none of the four people present there recognizes the name of either doctor.

Just when I'm considering a tracheotomy, I spot the building. It is removed from the street it faces by sixty yards, situated partially behind another much closer and a large parking lot. No sign betrays the presence of either edifice.

That, incidentally, has proved to be another peculiarity of the place: signs are generally – consistency seems to be a violation of local etiquette – far removed from the address, location, or building they locate.

The building’s construction and aspect are that of a residence, rather than an office or commercial site. An excellent disguise, shall we say. Again, you probably know the rest. Before Rita can be attended to by a physician, she must – gasping for breath - fill our completely a voluminous set of forms. These are very thorough, akin to intelligence briefing given a military commander before battle, information designed in this case to assure mortgage on the “patient’s” location, person, salary, and life. When we are not required – both of us - to put on an ankle-bracelet GPS locator, I am much relieved.

Then, I wait. Next to me on the waiting room couch, a man speaking Spanish to the cellular phone ubiquitous these days discusses in lurid detail his most recent sexual escapade - not his wife, I gather. When I say “detail,” I mean number of strokes. His three or four year old daughter sits on his lap, presumably listening. He is oblivious, either to her or to his audience, Anglos he assumes doesn’t understand Spanish.

After a while, Lothario gets up and leaves with the little girl, leaving me to wonder how and why he happened to be there in the first place.

(I just threw that in here, just to relieve the tension; but, then, this is about oblivious stupidity, isn’t it? It’s apropos, in that, at least.)

Recently, in an effort to obtain and have activated my own cellular phone at a local Radio Shack, I am obliged (use that word a lot, don’t I – it’s how I feel, anymore, about my country) to speak Japanese for several minutes with a woman in Tokyo. That after the guy behind the counter at the store, endeavoring to do the same, hands me the thing to say, “Can you understand what she’s saying?” The friend who has accompanied me stands staring in astonishment, as do several other persons nearby. Once we have found a mutually understood language, by the way, matters proceed smoothly.

To learn why my new Microsoft Publisher program won’t do “word wrap” around graphics on my website, I am obliged – that word, again – to speak to three (that’s three, during more than an hour of communicating) young men in Bombay, India! At length (THAT word again), I learn, “the program won’t do that.” Note, mind you, that nothing in the instructions that came with the program, nor anything in the manual I later bought TELL me that. I had to learn - the hard way – that “You wanted to get FrontPage – that’s Microsoft’s program to do that.”

And it goes on. In every single instance, these days, of realizing the necessity of interaction with my fellow Homo Sapiens wherein explanation comprised of simple declarative sentences will be required, further realization is that I will have to go through it all again. The girl (no comment, just no f------ comment), for instance, at the car dealership parts department who doesn’t know the difference between a conventional carburetor and fuel injection, or recognize the term “cold start valve.” Another – a guy this time - called about the same problem doesn’t know there are TWO oxygen sensors on a 2000 Toyota Corolla. Trying to find parts for Rita’s Jaguar, it takes ten full minutes to make the girl (yup, another one) at the Jaguar dealership understand what I mean when I speak about the sensors that light up the “boot open” light on the instrument panel display.

No tactical arrangement of statements of questions can communicate the idea to her. She asks, “Boot?” three times. When I say “the trunk,” it only confuses her more. Finally, in a moment of surpassing brilliance, I switch to Spanish. Bingo! That does it, but even at that, she doesn’t immediately recognize the word “baúl” (trunk). They say “trunca” in Tex-Mex Spanish. And they’ll have to order the parts.

Folks, this was funny years ago when columnists, guys like James Kilpatrick, Donald Kaul, Steven Allen, and the like, pointed it out. It’s not funny anymore. Yesterday, a plane taking off on the wrong runway crashed. ComAir Flight 5191 from Lexington, Kentucky killed forty-nine people.

To quote Strother Martin in the movie Cool Hand Luke, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”

The plane crashed and the people died because communication between the tower and the pilots didn’t succeed adequately. That, incidentally, has happened several times, the worst at Tenerife some years ago. That particular “failure to communicate” killed five hundred eighty three people (the highest number of fatalities of any single accident in aviation history) when the confused pilots of two Boeing 747 airliners, one taxing, one taking off, collided.

Communication, the ability to explain or give clear instructions, is the foundation and basis upon which human existence and civilization depend critically. It is a life or death thing, for individuals and nations. Any day now, “failure to communicate” will result in disaster that will make the plane crash on Tenerife or that of Flight 5191 seem like an “excuse me” bump in the supermarket.. Last night, for instance, CNN (I guess – I just don’t watch that much, anymore) host Glen Beck reflected - rather lugubriously, I thought – that President George W. Bush’s “problems” with his recently abysmal approval ratings concerning Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, and the rest had to do with the Commander in Chief’s limited communication skills.

That may be the understatement of the year – and history.

Beck’s point seemed to be, first, that the President didn’t lie – he just doesn’t explain himself very well (some would say he doesn’t much care whether he does or not); and, two, that he really couldn’t think of a way to break to us gently that our real enemy was Iran. So we attacked Iraq, instead (whew!). Mr. Beck’s incoherent apology made about as much sense as any of the attempts at communication of any of the people I mentioned earlier here, actually.

This morning, on National Public Radio, commentators’ efforts to explain gaps between obvious truth and what the President said concerning Iraq had me staring. Given the mangled and solecistic diction of the commentators, “Americans” trying to explain something as incomprehensibly illogical as Operation Iraqi Freedom was in the first place, the result resembled more than anything else the splattered verbiage on the instructions for that computer power supply back-up I mentioned, or the feckless rhetorical floundering of Verizon in trying to explain their dial up system installation, at the outset here.

As I type this, by amusing – even eerie - co-incidence, NPR is reporting a new sporting event, that of throwing a cell phone as far as possible. “I’ll bet you’ve had the same experience, that of being so frustrated with instructions you were receiving that you wanted to throw the phone as far as you could.” Someone, the reporter, says, threw a Nokia over three hundred feet.

Also interesting: mine, also a Nokia, went three hundred, twenty six feet (I used to be a pitcher, and, besides, NPR reports only one hundred people in the reported contest).

But this isn’t funny. It not only explains things as serious as those planes crashes, it may explain things like the World Trade Center (even if realization that the “dog didn’t bark” makes you think it was deliberate) and the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. At least in part, it explains the incredible events leading to invasion of Iraq, and the spastic operations and tactics that have characterized the “war” (hell, we can’t even agree or decide what to call it).

Just consider that we purport to establish “democracy” in an Islamic nation. Assuming that you can write an intelligible set of directions to the local court house, or explain how to boil an egg and change a tire, see if you can explain how that might be done.

Jesus! Now, maybe that explains why he attacked Iraq – if a regular guy, even one reasonably articulate, can get so frustrated that he throws a phone (thusly attacking the wrong source of his frustration), maybe a president, one about as articulate as Forrest Gump, got so frustrated that he attacked the wrong country? Maybe an English composition and diction test should be required or presidential candidates?

Remember the guy in the doctor’s office, the one regaling us all with his pornographic tale of sexual conquest? It occurs to me that there was another reason no one listening objected. No one could tell from his description what the hell he was talking about.

Maybe he was just explaining how to replace a light bulb.