Another short story

I promised another post about the little vignettes that WCAI, our local public radio station, plays throughout the day. This story, unlike yesterday's post, you can hear for yourself at this link. It's told by a local writer from the town of Truro on the outer part of Cape Cod. It's sad and funny at the same time. It's the story of a poor old fellow and his wife that save up to buy a coffee maker and then take that term too literally and start a fire with it. They didn't pour water in the machine nor put any coffee in it. It was a coffee "maker" after all. Why would they need to add anything? Luckily, people smelled something and got to them before it got serious.

It's easy to laugh but how many of us are confused by new technologies we don't understand? I'll tell a couple of other stories about this over the next couple of days - one about one of my grandmothers and one about a fellow I met at another job. But I can tell stories about myself, too.

I used to be able to work on cars - when they didn't have a million hoses and two million attached sub-assemblies on the engine. I hardly know where to begin, now. I can change the oil (and maybe the oil filter if it isn't in a place where you have to remove other parts to get to it) and add antifreeze but I can't even think of really working on the engine like my father and I used to.

Our car was making a strange noise one time and I tried to find the problem. I looked all though the engine and under the body and could find nothing. My son Evan, who was about 3 or 4 at the time, took one look and said, "Is that the problem, Dad?" Sure enough, he'd found that the exhaust pipe had caught on something and gotten twisted so that it was right up next to one of the tires and was blowing on the rubber - soon to be a major problem! I'd been overwhelmed by the complexity of the entire system and couldn't see it. Evan just looked for something out of place and solved it. I guess that's one way to deal with complex systems and this is what engineers are taught to do - reduce a complex system to a collection of less complex subsystems. I let the complexity confuse me. My son is probably a natural engineer.