Last month I mentioned that a weirdly high percentage of my students were somehow using umlauts in place of quotation marks and acute accent marks in place of apostrophes, like so:
Brandy says, ¨who wants to go out with me?¨ All the boys yell ¨ME, ME, ME¨. Brandy´s first date was with Spike at his house. Woody calls Spike and tells him that it´s his turn to date Brandy. Woody and Brandy go to Restaurant for a date. Woody ask her if she is feeling right and she says ¨yes¨.
To me the interesting thing about this was not the question of how this was happening, but the fact that the kids didn’t notice that anything was amiss. Nevertheless, a lot of people online wrote in to explain what was causing this. It had to do with key combinations when international mode was on, they explained. For instance, if you have that mode on and type a quotation mark followed by, say, the letter a, you get an a with an umlaut over it: ä. But that just raised more questions. Why were these students’ computers in international mode? It’s not as though it was only recent immigrants to whom this was happening. And how does this explain what I was seeing? I wasn’t seeing ÿ and ś; I was seeing ¨yes¨ and it´s.
A key piece of the solution arrived in a note from a substitute teacher who had noted the same phenomenon and identified the common factor: Chromebooks! I thought back and, yes, the umlaut crew was indeed made up of the kids who were using the Chromebooks the school had distributed rather than their own computers! I still don’t know why those Chromebooks would be set to international mode or why international mode would cause these results, but I think that after having that puzzle piece snap into place, pursuing this mystery any further would just be an anticlimax.
I bought a box of cereal that asks the reader to “join us in restoring 25 million sq.ft.” of farmland. So… less than a square mile?
- Back when I was working for a movie production company, my boss married an Australian woman who had been working as an English professor in (some pretty bleak parts of) the U.S. After he retired, which was not long thereafter, he often spoke of wanting to get out of Los Angeles… but seven years passed, and the two of them were still making their home in the 90048. Then the pandemic struck. After seeing what the Trump administration response looked like, they hopped on one of the planes repatriating Australians, and then in May when New Zealand finally opened its borders to incoming flights—but only from Australia—they moved to the South Island and bought a house. The one issue was that my boss’s wife had a cat that had been with her since she was in grad school, but which she’d had to leave with a sitter back in L.A. when she and my boss decamped to the Antipodes. To move to New Zealand, the cat would have to go through six months of quarantine, which seemed like too much to ask at the cat’s advanced age. Anyway, to skip to the end of the story, now I have a cat.
One of the first items on the to-do list I was given when I took custody of the cat was to make an appointment with a veterinarian. The local clinic came very highly reviewed, so I made an appointment. Just one problem: because of the covids, the procedure is to drive to the clinic (even if you live within walking distance) and call from the parking lot. “You must bring a cell phone,” says the appointment confirmation email. Uh-oh!
When I was a kid attending a computer science magnet high school, I would have been very surprised had you told me that I would grow up to be a luddite, and I actually wasn’t yet a luddite when I initially passed on all these mobile devices. I just didn’t want to pay for a subscription to a service I was almost never going to use. “You can talk to anyone you want while you’re on the go!” Okay, but I was never on the go and I never talked to anyone, so why would I pay forty bucks a month for that? When pay phones started to disappear, I did get a bottom-of-the-line cell phone for emergencies (car accidents that threatened to make me late for tutoring appointments, etc.), but even then I got a pay-as-you-go plan: I’d put in ten dollars and it would last me a couple of years. (When I got the email from the vet I tried to get this phone working, but apparently the network it used to run on no longer exists.) When smartie phones became a thing, again, I initially had no hostility toward them—I just didn’t think I would get any use out of one. When they became more widespread and I would occasionally be handed one, I found that even if I did ever find such a device useful, operating the thing would drive me crazy: I can’t stand the tiny screens—even the 34" monitor I’m using right now feels pretty cramped to me—and my OCD keeps me from touching a screen, so I’d have to use a stylus. And as time has gone on and I have seen how addictive these things are, to never own one has become more of a conscious decision.
But it does seem like we’re reaching a point at which “you have a smartphone” is moving from an expectation along the lines of “you have a car” to one more like “you have the ability to read a street sign”. For instance, a few days ago I was on a BART train when a BART employee entered the car and started going seat to seat asking whether people would be willing to take a survey. Everyone else in the car waved her away. Then she came to my seat. “Would you be willing to take a survey about your experience today?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“Great!” she said. She opened up the three-ring binder she was carrying. Inside was a laminated sheet of paper with a giant QR code on it. She held it up expectantly.
“I don’t have a smartphone,” I said.
She goggled at me for a moment. “Uh, okay, have a nice day!” she said, snapping the binder shut and heading to the next car.
I bought a shirt on Ebay; the shipping was expensive and took many weeks because the package had to wend its way here from Estonia. I was interested to see that the shipping label was bilingual: every line was written twice, first in Estonian, then in… French. Odd. Though I guess it’s trilingual now, as the shipper filled it out in English.
As I write this, we’re in a phase in which it’s always a question whether any given place one might go will require a mask or not. Ellie and I went to the Temescal farmers’ market, masks on, only for me to be stunned to find 90% of the patrons milling around without masks. We took ours off. A few days later I went to Target, saw that the sign out front specifically said that only the unvaccinated needed to wear masks, walked in without mine… and discovered that I was the only person there without one. I quickly put mine on so as not to draw glares. And this hadn’t occurred to me until I wrote the previous entry, but you know what it kind of reminds me of? Visiting Montreal! Will this be a shop where I have to speak French? Will this one be anglophone? Will it be one of those “bonjour hello” situations in which we then have to awkwardly negotiate whether my French or the proprietor’s English is better? (Though I guess I won’t need to worry about that for a while, for although it appears that around 130 countries are open to visitors from the U.S., Canada is not one of them.)
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