20 Days Without a PC

Day 8 Through Day 17

Day 8

Today we're preparing for a family trip to New Jersey. Usually I would tote my laptop to write and to check e-mail with. I'd back up its hard disk over my network before traveling, too. This time I just pack my cell phone charger. With no network hub or cables to curse at, I have no choice but to help my kids with their packing.

Day 9

We zip through airport security, as do the laptop-encumbered passengers. Waiting at the gate, I relax and read a book. If my notebook were here, I would probably be tempted to find a phone booth with a data port and compulsively check my e-mail--despite the sluggish connection, and despite the fact that I would probably just end up idly weeding the spam from my in-box.

We're flying into LaGuardia; ordinarily I'd have gone to MapQuest to get the best driving route from there to New Jersey. Instead, I call a friend for advice: the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to the Verrazano Bridge, then across the Goethals Bridge. In hindsight, her advice wasn't so good--the Outerbridge Crossing would have been better than the Goethals. Even a geography-savvy local can't quite match the instant precision of MapQuest.

Day 12

One of my in-laws asks me how to burn a song onto CD, something I could tell her how to do while blindfolded and locked in an isolation booth. But she hesitates to fire up the PC, claiming that it's too much effort. I suspect that she's just trying to shield me from contamination.

Our flight home is delayed. One guy appears to be watching a DVD while rocking out to wild music at the same time. I feel a twinge of jealousy. Still, I'll bet his battery won't make it past Cleveland.

Day 14

When I peruse the mail that came during our trip, I find a card from a friend who's visiting Italy. He says the only reason he can take three weeks off is that Italy has Internet access points on every other corner. My e-mail about the experiment reached him in a café in Siena. Try keeping in touch like that with FedEx.

Day 16

I'm at the library for the first time in eons, in search of some car prices and Wendell Berry's essay "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer," both things that I could have found in moments with Google.

I hunt for the card catalog, but it's not there. Turns out the library has replaced it with PCs that access an interlibrary network. I ask the reference librarian to look up a few books for me, since, um, I'm not much good at computers. She's happy to oblige. I ask if I can call the reference desk later for a car price. "Sure," she says. "Try asking us anything." An uneasy moment of silence passes while I imagine a thousand things I will never ask a librarian.

In the evening I read Wendell Berry, a writer who also works his Kentucky farm using horses. He states that it is his first duty "to reduce, so far as I can, my own consumption," and complains that a computer won't make him a better writer. But no one has said that a PC will make you a better writer, I think to myself. He allows that "a computer will help you to write faster, easier, and more" but asks, "Do I, then, want to write faster, easier, and more? No." That's fine for Wendell Berry. Not all of us can afford to farm with horses, though. I'd like to write better and write faster, easier, and more.

Day 17

Jim, the Selectric repairman, comes by. IBM built its last Selectric in 1985, but he says that the machines are still widely used to fill out preprinted forms. As he toils, he recommends nutritional supplements for my tendinitis, and tells me about the 25th Infantry's December 1967 campaign in Vietnam (he's a vet).

Afterward I head to an appointment with Tina, a therapist who specializes in assisting computer addicts. My own tech cravings are now in check, so I interview her about computer addiction--including her own compulsive playing of the puzzle game Tetris. She knew she had a problem when her husband pointed out that her Tetris sessions were running longer than 5 hours.

One day, as she was talking with a patient, she began to see phantom Tetris blocks falling into place in the air in front of her. "That's when I said, 'no more,'" she remembers.

Her advice for those who love computers too much? First, find out what that wonderful feeling is that comes from using the PC. "People are often very reluctant to talk about it," she says. She encourages patients to find other ways of getting the same feeling. "I'm not asking them to give up the computer, I'm asking them to try this other [way]," she adds.