THE SILENT TRANSACTION By Jim Kittelberger PREAMBLE: I could not decide which paragraph I wished to use for the last paragraph of the piece. I left it to my editor. My editor, who tells me what she thinks, read the two paragraphs and told me flat out that the last part is way over the top and should be omitted. She further added that it sounded like I was in a rage and that I really didn’t believe any of what I had written. I hate to admit it, but she’s right. That said, it felt therapeutic to write it, like going to a shrink I would suppose, and purging yourself of all that dwells and festers. So I agreed with her that the final paragraph is way too much, but I felt good writing it so I will leave it so you can read it and get angry with me and you’ll feel better also. The cash register rings up the amount to be tendered and the cashier looks at the customer with a sullen look on her face. The customer, me, looks back at her. “One fifty”, comes out of the cashier’s mouth, as she is looking somewhere but not at me. I write the check and hand it to her. She deposits it in the cash register and resumes looking at that somewhere place. The bag that she shoved my purchase into sits on the counter, and after another interlude of silence, I assume we are done. I pick up the bag and walk out of the store, thus ending another transaction in the new screw you era. Does this sound familiar or am I just one of the saps of the world that everyone likes to play this trick on? Maybe it’s just been a bad week. Twice this week, I have tried to make small talk with a person in a retail store, and twice I have had the person look at me like I had small pox, although one did manage to nod his head before he grabbed his change and fled. My God, I’m sixty-five years old, reasonably presentable and certainly not threatening in any way. I don’t think they believe I’m going to ask for a handout, nor do I believe they think I’m a Moonie getting ready to hand them a flower in exchange for a donation. I think they and the sullen cashier are just a few of the examples of the age we now live in, that seems to becoming more and more insular, and much less anxious to reach out for human contact. These examples are of course not the norm but the exception. But it happens enough that I am aware when it does. I am also aware of one reason for this unsociability. A huge technological wave arrived in the world a decade or two ago. That wave was greeted by all of us with open arms. The new age brought with it the marvel of our time, the computer. And I need not list what that brought with it, video games, computer games, computer nerds, and the rest of us, who will sit at a computer for hours on end, (which of course, I am guilty of much too often). People of all ages have taken to these activities with relish, but not without giving up something. That is the time that could have been spent with other live actual people talking, sharing thoughts and feelings. The one common problem created is that most of the new high tech pursuits are one person to a computer or television. Children take to these new pursuits like a duck to water because they are just plain fun. But what they give up or what we allow them to give up, is the give and take of playing with other children where they can learn the greatest lessons of their life, how to develop social skills. Too easy? Maybe. Or Well now you know my dilemma. What should I do about it? I hope to have many more years on this earth and I intend to keep going out in public. But if the trend, as I see it continues, and rudeness is the way of the future, I suppose I should start now working on my rude tactics so I can fit right in. I will initially, and this will be the easiest, change my facial expression to one of sullenness or even surliness, and trim my vocabulary to words of one syllable that could be spoken with a grunt. One technique that I think I will like would go like this: someone speaks to me and I answer him or her with my Robert DeNiro ‘Taxi’ imitation, “Me? You’re talking to me? Then I’ll just sneer and walk away. Yeah that’s good; hey I’m liking this. Rude is good. Perhaps as a warm up before going out into public, I’ll bite off a head of a bat or maybe a sparrow ala Ozzie Osbourne to get into the mood. My television choices should also change, I’m thinking with my new persona that Howard Stern would be a top choice. He, of the tell-it-like-it-is genre is about as classy as it will get in my new world. I’m much too old to start wearing clothes that are much too large and letting them hang down to my kneecaps seems a little dangerous. But I can start wearing any caps I may have backwards or sideways, and perhaps I should put a propeller on top, it wouldn’t look any stupider, I don’t think. Well after I’ve done all these things to make me fit in with the new rude to the ears, rude to the eyes, rude to any sensibilities I may have left, the world may have changed back to a place much more pleasant to live in, or I may have developed Alzheimer’s and not care anymore.