Bridging an unfathomable gap.
While reading Brian Krebs’s latest article in the Washington Post, I came across a quote that just grabbed me:
In May, the magistrate overseeing the trial, Justice Peter Openshaw, interrupted the proceedings with a statement that observers said stunned prosecutors for the Crown. “The trouble is I don’t understand the language. I don’t really understand what a Web site is.”
Now, I’m not about to go on a rant about “how stupid can you be?” Not at all—I’m just trying to fathom what it must be like for someone to have grown up normal.
You see, it’s quotes like this that make me realize what an odd duck I am. I’ve been playing around with computers since the age of twelve, when I complained (unwisely) of being bored, and my father threw a Basic manual at me and told me to “go make the bell on the teletype ring.” I’ve been in the computer world ever since, so thoroughly that I have no idea what it’s like to view it from the outside. It’s as if I’ve been a fish in the ocean, coming face-to-face with someone from a desert who’d never seen a body of water.
What if ...? I wonder how very different my whole life would have been without the Internet. I certainly wouldn’t be in this field, with the spouse and family that I have. I might still be in my hometown, doing something completely different, or I might have ended up on the other side of the planet, scratching my head at this point and going, “Web what?”
Food for thought.
Posted by shrdlu on Thursday, July 05, 2007(2) Comments • Permalink •
