Shopping Bytes
Copyright © 1999 by Dave Badtke
Christmas is four days away. Since I’m disorganized and shopping-phobic, I’ve got nothing and need to get everything for everyone.
I’m thinking about my two nephews who live in Michigan. Through double hearsay – my sister to my wife to me – I learned they want clothes which I refuse to get them because, one, I hate shopping for clothes and, two, I’m too out of touch with 12 and 14-year-olds to know what they’d like.
I ask my wife for ideas.
Books, she says. She wants to give them gift certificates to Barnes and Noble. I’d prefer to get them gift certificates from an independent bookstore in Kalamazoo where they could develop a close relationship with the staff who would help them pick special books that might change their lives.
I search the internet and find www.booksense.com which claims that, in the future, I’ll be able to shop online through locally owned bookstores. Linking independents on the web sounds like a good way to compete with B&N and Amazon.com, so I call their 800 number. The person who answers says she really can’t tell me anything about what services will be provided in the future, but she can give me the numbers of a couple bookstores in Kalamazoo.
I call one of them. An employee answers who says he’d be happy to mail a gift certificate, but I can’t get a good sense of him or the store.
I call my sister to ask her if she has ever heard of the place. She hasn’t. I tell her it’s located on the Downtown Pedestrian Mall; the first Mall in the US that excluded cars when it shut down Burdick Street to auto traffic in 1959; the Mall where my grandmother took me to shop at Gilmore’s Department Store, which I didn’t like, followed by a wonderful lunch at Schnittser’s, which I loved.
Or was it Shinsellfarb’s? I ask my sister.
She groans. All those stores are long gone, she says. We don’t go there any more. They opened up most of the Mall to automobile traffic and ….
She chronicles the Mall’s demise, but I’m too depressed to listen and finally ask her which bookstore she’d recommend. Barnes and Noble, she says.
I’m back where I started.
What about computers? I ask her. How do the boys use their computers? She tells me they do some homework, mainly writing, and play games. I ask if they know how to type, certain that Mavis Beacon’s typing program will be my deliverance, but she says they already have the program.
Well, I’m certainly not going to buy them computer games. I ask my sister if she knows of any good educational programs, something, you know, that would help them learn to think?
The phone goes dead while she ponders possibilities.
There must be something, she says.
I agree. Towns are spending billions to wire classrooms, I say. There must be good educational software out there.
Another pause. Neither one of us can think of anything.
I hang up and go back on the internet and run across a number for the Preservation Coordinator in Kalamazoo. I leave a message asking him about Shinsellmacher’s.
I find a site that promises to sort good educational software from bad, but what they recommend imitates activities better done without a computer. They want me to buy a jigsaw-puzzle program because pieces won’t be lost and the puzzle won’t lie around the house unfinished for months.
My mom calls back and we talk for a while about Schintzel’s.
I go back to the web. They must be kidding! Having a table set up with pieces scattered and edges forming as a ready challenge to all who pass is the best part of a jigsaw puzzle.
Larry Burns from Kalamazoo calls to give me the scoop on Schensul’s Cafeteria and the Mall. We need a paradigm shift, he tells me. We’re thinking of cities and towns as our grandfathers and fathers thought of them. We need to mix the old with the new in innovative new ways. He tells me about a place in Helsinki where you surf the web sitting on a hard-drive seat holding keyboard handlebars with a computer-screen windshield, bytes blowing through your hair.
He’s got a point. I go back to the web seeking more than a Christmas present and find "Lego Mindstorms: The Robotic Invention System," the ultimate paradigm present. You program its RCX microcomputer with a PC. There are 700 Lego pieces, an infrared transmitter, light and touch sensors, motors, gears - there’s even something called a "Constructopedia building guide!" This sounds better than my train set and Erector Set combined. Definitely a new world in the works.
I check eToys.com - out of stock. I order from Amazon.com. Two days delivery. I hope. So much for avoiding the big eGuys.
It’s not cheap, so I give it to my sister’s family and my mom. What the heck, I figure, they all need to learn how to program.
I dream of Christmas morning when their first robot walks past the lighted tree, avoiding opened presents, through the hallway and into the dark recesses of the house, its red LED eyes searching the void. Too bad I won’t be there to see it.
Have a great Christmas.
- Dave Badtke is founder of the developing Carquinez Review literary journal. Find him on the web at www.CarquinezReview.com.
Contact him at:
Dave@CarquinezReview.com or Dave@Badtke.com