Friends and Computers

by Pa Rock
Social Commentator

(Note:  This week I had a couple of pieces of correspondence regarding friends.  One was from a neighbor whose last name I could not remember, and the other was an email regarding the death of friend whom I had known while working overseas.  Both stories were impacted by Google, situations which left me pondering the pervasive power of computers.)

Dennis:

I have a neighbor named Dennis who lives a couple of hundred yards down the same road as me.  We share a property line that is mostly a raggedy-assed fencerow overgrown with saplings and weeds.  I’m not sure which of us owns the sagging barbed wire fence, and Dennis probably doesn’t know either, but I have worked diligently for the five years that I have lived here trying to get my side of the fencerow cleaned out.

The first fall that I lived here Dennis put his little Chevy S-10 pickup out in his front yard along with a “for sale” sign.  I pulled in as soon as I saw the sign, introduced myself, took the truck for a spin – and bought it.  A couple of weeks later I received a Christmas card from Dennis.  Over the years, when I had chickens, I would occasionally take him eggs, but we rarely ran into each other for the most part.  Yet those Christmas cards kept coming – and I always sent one in return as soon as his arrived.    I didn’t have to remember anything because his name and address were right there on the card.

Easy peazy.

But this year Dennis changed things up.   His card arrived about mid-December, when it usually does, but this time he forgot to include his name and address on the envelope.   And I could not for the life of me remember his last name.

I usually keep old Christmas cards, but this year I have been moving things to the storage shed at the back of my property – and when I went to look for the old Christmas cards that I had packed away during the summer, I came up empty.  I walked down the road this afternoon and checked out Dennis’s mailbox, and it had his address – but not his name.  Then I went on Google and learned all about his house, including the current estimated value – but still came up empty on the name.

Finally I had a brain fart that produced a possible last name, and I googled that and hit pay dirt!  I now know Dennis’s last name, where he was born as well as his birthday, and the names of a couple of friends and several family members.  

The moral of this story is – if you think your life is private, don’t search for yourself on the internet or you are likely to be very disappointed!

And the card is in the mail!

(Next year I can even send Dennis a birthday card!)

Wencil:

Wencil was another friend of mine, but he passed away last March.  I only knew Wencil briefly – we worked in the same unit on Okinawa back when I arrived on the island in the summer of 2010.   He left and returned to the states a couple of months after I got there, and my friend Valerie – from Phoenix – arrived and took over his job.

Wencil was his first name, and that is all he ever went by.  As far as I can remember, I never knew his last name.

Wencil was a few years older than me and he had some obvious health issues.  He had a girlfriend back in St. Louis, but had come to Okinawa on his own on a two-year job contract.   One day, on a weekend, I discovered him sitting on a bench outside of the post office at Kadena Air Base, the base where we both worked.  He was disoriented and could not even remember his name.  That incident resulted in his hospitalization, and not too long after that he made a decision to pack it in and head home.

Wencil and I had both previously worked for the Missouri Department of Family and Children’s Services, me in southern Missouri and him in the St. Louis area.  We knew a couple of people in common, and after he left the island I would occasionally hear bits and pieces of what he was up to back home.  Mainly he was retired.

This week I received an email from one of the friends that we had in common in the St. Louis area.  She had learned via a message in a Christmas card that Wencil had passed away in March.  She included a few details about his passing.  I replied that I would inform some of the friends that we worked with on Okinawa.

I carefully typed a message to several friends from that era with whom I still have contact, and just before I hit the “send” button I gave it one last re-read.  That was fortunate because Google had changed his name from “Wencil” to “Pencil” throughout the body of the text.  I corrected the misspellings, and Google quickly corrected me again.  We went on that way through three attempts before Google grudgingly relented and allowed me to do it my way – but the email server still was unhappy and underlined each mention of Wencil with a red line – just as it is doing as I type this blog!

One of my friends who also uses a Gmail account replied later in the day saying that she had gotten my message and was sorry to hear about “Pencil.”

Google had the last word!

And it was “pencil”!

Rest in peace, old friend.  May your spirit soar and your lead never break!