I was watching an old black and white movie the other night (yes, at one time they did not have the technology to make colour movies - that happened about the time I was born) and the woman who was working the telephone switchboard got the wires crossed. Like the Tomlin skit, the results were quite amusing as the characters were suddenly talking to people they did not know. (And yes, the movie did have sound in case you were thinking I must be really, really old). Getting your wires crossed now means a conversation with another person may be out of sync and you are actually talking about two different things. It occasionally happens at our house.
We have come a long way in our ability to communicate across distances beyond the range of a shouted voice. We tried drum beats and smoke signals, written words carried by birds and people on horses, however the first big advance came with the telegraph where we used electrons in the form of dots and dashes to flow in copper wires to distant towns. And then eventually across the oceans using underwater cables as shown in the photo.
Back in the not too distant past you could sometimes hear some other conversation on the telephone as the analogue systems were not as discreet as the current digital systems. I guess the modern version is people with hearing aids that pick up radio stations. Or perhaps there are occasions when people really do hear something different than what was said. We later claim that “it” was taken out of context.
For those readers old enough to be curious about what makes your car engine work and have actually lifted the hood to take a peek at all the wires, sensors, switches and things labelled Do Not Touch, you might be interested to learn that at one time it was a common problem - getting the wires crossed on your motor. This harkens back to the days of spark plugs and distributors. It was often necessary to remove the spark plugs, clean the carbon off them, re-gap them (to the thickness of an American dime - Canadian dimes were too thick and only worked for Ford engines) and then re-attach the plugs to the correct wires on the distributor. Crossed wires would result in loud back-fires if the engine did start on the other six cylinders. The manufacturers finally tried numbering the wires and eventually just made the length of the wire to match only the distance to the proper spark plug.
This brilliant concept was adopted by the modern engineers and the makers of cell phones, radios, and computer communications. They used only discreet signals, bundled into packets of certain lengths, to ensure people communicated as they wished. Now the only time you hear the wrong (and often indiscreet) conversation is when people talk loudly into their devices, oblivious to being very annoying or quite entertaining to anyone nearby.
However, I am now wondering just how many of those digital signals are unique. Oh, I know how the signals can be encrypted and secured by the use of logarithms, but surely as we crowd our atmosphere with more and more signals somebody is going to use the same frequency and in the best case scenario, there will be confusion. Confusion not unlike the crossed wires in the old movie with the switchboard.
We know that ‘Big Brother’ has the ability to hack into our cell phones and computer systems. They do not need a patch wire to do it (The old days again: a wire with three plugs on it so the ‘sheriff’ could listen in on a telephone conversation). All those digital signals in the ether can be intercepted and copied. The ‘address’ of the users can be tracked and indeed located by GPS signals. But what happens when Big Brother gets the wires crossed and thinks you have said something bad or dangerous and it was not you at all?
What happens when that sensor on your car that warns you to slow down tells a nearby car to steer left to avoid a collision? What happens when that drone carrying a camera gets a wrong number and goes berserk, crashes and injures people? What happens when Amazon delivers that very personal package, wrapped tactfully in plain brown paper, to the wrong address? What happens when a wrong message is sent to a robot trading system on the stock market (oops, that already happened) and zillions of make-believe dollars are traded in error? What happens when we get enough carbon and other particulate in the atmosphere to short-out or confuse the electronic signals?
Of course we all know that we have the technology and brainpower to ensure that none of those doomsday examples ever happen. Why even as I type this on my computer I know that I can send it into the office - across the ether - and it will magically appear on your screen - and hundreds of other screens at the same instant. You may even print it with a printer that is not connected physically to your computer.
All the technology in the world will not help us communicate better directly with each other. Sometimes different languages can muddy the water and things lost in translation can seem like the crossed wires situation. What we need to do is all speak using the words we each understand. Lawyers, for example, can use their legalese when talking to each other, but spare us the mumbo-jumbo when we want a simple answer. Politicians likewise and I hesitate to use Donald Trump as an example.
Oh, and if you find a typo in this article it is likely the result of a crossed wire somewhere between my fingers and your eyes. Just saying.
