I was reaching into a bag of potato chips when my hand encountered something that clearly was not a potato chip.
As a rule, when you`re eating food you would just as soon not come upon a non-food product in the package. Still, you want to check it out, so I pulled the foreign object from the bag of potato chips and saw that it was a neatly wrapped premium item. Like you used to get in boxes of Cracker Jack.
I always liked the gifts in Cracker Jack. I wondered what my gift in this bag of potato chips was going to be. A toy soldier? A miniature car? A little rubber ball? I was quite excited about this, if the truth be told.
So I unwrapped my gift. The gift was 15 minutes of free long-distance time.
Seriously. One of those long-distance telephone services had worked out a deal with the potato-chip company: With every big bag of potato chips, you got 15 minutes of talk. Inside a clean little plastic packet was an instruction sheet telling me how to hook up for my 15 minutes.
This is one of the major things that is askew with our contemporary society. The concept of distance, of it being difficult to know about things that are far away, has just about disappeared. If you work in an office, you may have noticed the generational demarcation. Older employees will say urgently into the telephone, as if it`s a big deal: ”This is a long-distance call.” Meaning: Please-hurry. I`m calling from another city. Younger employees don`t quite understand this. Long-distance? No distance is long. A long-distance call has mystery or value? Hey, they give the things away in bags of potato chips.
Distance was once seen as the enemy-an almost insurmountable force that promoted lack of understanding between nations, loneliness between friends and families who had parted, remoteness to news stories that could not be seen, and thus were regarded as fuzzy rumors.
Now all of that is gone, but the diminishing of the concept of distance has brought its own sense of disorientation, in an almost exactly converse way. Name your poison-CNN, fax machines, portable phones, Federal Express. If the idea was to erase distance and make the world more efficient and intimate, the perhaps-unintentional result was to raise the aggregate blood pressure of the globe a few unwelcome notches and to do away with a certain level of perspective. Telephone wires running pole-to-pole out of your neighborhood toward the next block and the next town once seemed close to exotic; now satellite video signals from London or Moscow to your home bring mostly a yawn, if that.
You may remember, in the early days of direct-dial phone service, calling directory assistance in distant cities just to hear the accent of the operator. It was free, and like a little excursion you could get away with. Hello, Memphis? What`s the temperature down there today? For the rest of the afternoon, if you were a kid, you felt as if you`d pulled something off. You had talked to someone in Tennessee.
Because communicating with people far away was costly and less than simple to accomplish (”Operator? Could you give me time and charges?”), there was a certain giddiness to the process. If it wasn`t quite as out of the customary as a vacation with the family, neither was it something to be taken for granted. A call to a grandparent was often preceded by a gathering of the family around the telephone, in carefully arranged sequence, so that each child could be handed the phone like a baton in an Olympic relay race, with not a millisecond wasted en route to the finish line. You may not remember much about the content of those conversations, but you likely remember your brother or sister saying ”Bye” to the grandparent in one breath and you starting the next sentence before the phone was even firmly in your palm.
Whatever distance is today, it`s not long. You can be in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on a ship and receive a fax from Los Angeles so crisp you can read it in dim light; you can make yourself dizzy switching from a crisis in the former Yugoslavia to a crisis in Florida to a crisis on the African continent. In matters of private joy or of public heartache, you have trouble regulating the temperature of your emotional thermometer; it`s all coming in from so many places, and no one`s asking the operator for time and charges, although the cable bill does arrive promptly once a month.
Perhaps families still do gather around the telephone trying to save precious seconds on that Sunday evening call to the grandparents, but if they buy the right bag of potato chips the first 15 minutes are free. Even though a toy soldier, for some reason, suddenly seems like a cooler gift, one that a kid can keep.
