Double Dentist
The promise of carrying a living, breathing, beeping and chirping copy of your appointment schedule around in your pocket or purse is, to some of us, an irresistible temptation. Never again forget a birthday or dentist appointment!
What really makes this idea attractive is the magic of software: an incarnation of this calendar can live on your desktop, in your laptop, and on every phone, tablet, or phablet in your possession; change an appointment on one, and they will all reflect the new reality.
I began this journey with a chunky plastic Palm Pilot and some kind of Macintosh. To synchronize, one was required to physically plug the Palm into the Mac and run some software. To keep the dream alive I eventually had to modify a data cable, when Macs shed their serial ports. I’m not a hardware person, so this should indicate the depth of my commitment.
Yes, “synchronize.” So much promise in three syllables. If you are one of the bruised faithful, you utter this word through clenched teeth, because you know what happens. I started seeing double. After a while all my appointments were listed twice: twice on the Palm, and twice on the Palm software running on the Mac. The problem would seem to come and go. At times there were four copies: four versions of myself were expected to attend the same meeting at the same time. At least all the meetings were in the same place.
And then, one day, the problem suddenly resolved itself. In a sense. All my appointments simply vanished, from both the Palm and the Mac. I put away these childish things and returned to paper, for a while.
As technology evolved I heard the whispered enticement, “synchronize,” in my ear. I tried again with sleeker Palms, with tiny phones and their tiny calendars, with big phones on which one can read novels. Now I can synchronize without doing or plugging in anything! It happens through the magic of networks and software working together to make all our lives an effortless ramble from one engagement to the next, unencumbered by the need to remember any of it.
But the devilish duplication: it kept returning. Thursday, 4:00 pm: Dentist. Followed immediately by: Thursday, 4:00 pm: Dentist. But, I have to say, it was never as bad as in the early days of Palm. Just here and there, like an imperfection deliberately introduced into the intricate design of a rug from Arabia, to remind us of our human fallibility.
These days, it’s Android, “synchronized” with Google calendar. Worked pretty well for a while. Until yesterday, when I see that most of my appointments on the phone are … sigh.
