The Sound of Sam
This is Washington, where the summer heat bounces off the pavement in steamy waves. Government workers’ blue-light-special ties hang limply from sweat-soaked necks. An endless stream of secretaries lope on retro stacked-heeled shoes toward the Metro. The human mass moves along huge squat buildings that hint at the long-dead WPA, barely recognizing each other’s existence until queuing for position at the deli counter or half-smoke vendor cart.
Among the eddies and streams of people are lawyers, consultants, lobbyists and media types. These denizens demonstrate the most carnivorous nature. They feed on Congress. They dine on executive decisions. They consume their own in cannibalistic frenzy. These political predators hear and smell things-indications that are missed by the untrained ears and antennae of other humans.
They hear rumblings of change, like tectonic plates moving a millimeter closer to the ocean, emanating basso echoes from the halls of Congress. They detect a high-pitched squeal, like that of a small creature before it trembles for the last time, whistling from the lifeless lips of a constituent who has been told “That’s the way it is.” They sense the rhythmic drone of the bureaucratic machinery pounding along, one pile-driving beat at a time.
I’m one of the predators: a lawyer. I’ve been trained to see a catastrophe as a billable occurrence and devastation as opportunity. And, like a small child, I’ve been told again and again to look both ways before crossing the agency highways where truckloads of decisions, rules, regulations, licenses and fertilizer are carted to the nation’s hinterlands.
“Don’t get in the way, boy,” is the admonition. Sometimes, I don’t listen. Sometimes, I’m listening to other sounds-sweet, sad sounds, that overpower the din from meeting and committee rooms. Like a cricket’s song of unrequited love, the sound that I hear chirps and sings to my conscience, reminding me that it wasn’t always like this for me. It shouldn’t always be like this. I try to ignore it, or dismiss it as an unworthy distraction. But it keeps coming and coming, until I have to pay attention. I have to stop shooing it from my mind. I have to act.
The sound I hear is the distant cry of the recipients and victims of those truckloads of regulation and decisions, made with mechanized precision on the desktops and laptops and cyberflops of the government. The sound of one guy back in Missouri who’s asking, “Why?” I hear it again and again. “Why?” He might be a guy named Sam, who works in a plant down the street from the loading dock my old man spent 29 years patrolling. His damn radio won’t work because he’s getting interference from another operator again, and nobody’s doing anything about it. Sam complains to the boss, who tells him, “They’re working on it.” But Sam knows that they’ve been working on it for over a year, and it’s just getting worse.
Sam is the guy who had to take the cellular phone out of his wife’s car. They can’t afford it anymore, because his cable bill keeps creeping up and up at the same time that his favorite team is switching to pay-per-view. Now he reads that he’ll have to buy a new television set for something called HDTV. His set works fine. It’s the world that’s a little screwy.
Sam bought his kid a computer a few years ago. He had to scrimp to get it, and his wife had to wear the same dress two years in a row to the family Christmas dinner, but they figured they were doing right by the kid. Now the damn thing is obsolete and won’t run the new software. The kid claims he’s the only 15-year-old on earth with something called a “386.” Sam feels rotten, but a new computer costs over a grand, and the Chevy needs an overhaul.
Sam reads in the paper that his cable company just got sold for billions, and he stares at the notice in his bill that says the rates are going up again. And while he’s staring down at the stack of bills on the kitchen table, he notices that he’s still being charged two bucks a month for digit dialing. Sam can’t remember the last time he saw a rotary phone. It was sometime before the phone company told him he was now the owner of his home telephone equipment and the wiring in his house. He remembers he wasn’t sure what that meant, but Sam kept that secret to himself.
Aunt Martha’s birthday card ticked him off. The wife forgot to tell her that the area code has changed, and Aunt Martha didn’t know how to get the new one. She’s over 80, you see, and talking to telephonic menus is simply too foreign, too new. Aunt Martha doesn’t know from LATAs. She has never surfed the ‘Net or received email or seen “The X-Files.” But she makes the best strawberry-rhubarb pie in Pella, IA.
Sam rakes his calloused fingers through his thinning hair and stares out the window. A long, dejected sigh rushes from Sam’s lips, with a sound like dusty air from a bellows at the bottom of a cave, that only a tear could punctuate. At the end, Sam asks in a small voice, “Why?”
That’s the sound I hear-the one that keeps nagging me, berating me, making me do things, write things, say things that cause my fellow capital carnivores to look sideways and shake their heads. Like a milliwatt into a preamp and out a high-gain antenna, I repeat Sam’s question loud as I can. I shout it with the power of overused lungs. “WHY?!”
Why doesn’t the FCC care whether Sam’s radio works? Why does Congress allow the telephone companies to charge for a “new technology” that has been in the market for over 20 years? Why do cable rates continue to rise with impunity? Why are computer manufacturers allowed to make two-year-old models obsolete? Why can’t you go down to the phone company and sit across the desk from someone who will discuss your bill and answer your questions? Why, with every newfangled device, does the price for service seem to go up and up for features that Sam can’t use-and wouldn’t buy if he had a choice?
Forget about PCS, the TDF, the OPP, the GAO, the Portals, co-locations, TNPP agreements, Y2K, TINs, the ULS, the WTB and the political/global/re-engineered/TQM crudathon that flows across the bored, sweaty pages of the business and op-ed pages of the Post and the Times. Just answer me this: With all of the technological advances that this industry has made in the last 20 years, why isn’t Sam’s life better and fairer?
It’s a question that keeps me going.
