Phthursday Musings: With Another Fax, Probably

Many of you will remember this very famous United Airlines commercial:

A CEO type wanders around lecturing about a customer who fired the company because “he didn’t know us anymore” because everything was being done by phone or fax. The CEO’s solution was to send his people out to have face to face meetings. That’s over 200 cities!

I know it was a remarkable commercial because they still used it years later. But don’t take my word for it. In 2022, someone actually declared that it “could very well be the best commercial ever”, and when have I ever, ever, disagreed with anything published by Vending Marketwatch?

I thought of this commercial this week due to a confluence of circumstance. The thing is that sometimes when it seems like the world is trying to tell you something, you realize that you are the one who has been trying to tell yourself something all along.

A couple of weekends ago, Walt Hickey from Numlock News published an interview with Adam Chandler, author of the newly released book 99% Perspiration, which his website says "explores the culture of work in American life and how our obsessions with work and self-reliance divides and deflate us." This not only sold me on finding the book, but also mentioned was his first book, Drive-Thru Dreams, which “examines American culture, history, and identity through the prism of fast food.” I got my hands on both, and this week I finished Drive-Thru Dreams.

Among a number of intriguing arguments Chandler makes involves the idea of the fast food place as a “third place”. If you’re unfamiliar with the term, think of home as the “first place”, work or school as the “second place”, and third places as sort of neutral places where a lot of disparate people from a given community might all be present, might interact with one another, might literally break bread together. Classic third places are churches, bars, coffee shops, parks… the key being places where people interact as part of a community, very potentially including people they don’t know.

If anything I’d thought of a fast food restaurant - sanitized, homogenized, lacking character - as destructive to the idea of a third place, but Chandler has made me rethink this. Don’t think of how Starbucks has displaced mom and pop coffee shops which were community institutions. Think instead of how a Dairy Queen in a rural town might actually be one of the most important community institutions there.

I really like the insight about what a third place might be and who might be there. Maybe the feed store in an old rural town always functioned as a third place, but that was a time of very different dynamics. Chandler is getting at the idea of sharing something which was also semi-universal - six states away someone else is getting a Mr. Misty Freeze at the same time! - while also something unifying to the specific locale. I think this was especiallythe case for younger people. Now, in later years malls sort of provided a similar function, but, well, the thing is that it’s been 27 years since Isaac Brock wrote:

The malls are the soon to be ghost towns

Well, so long, farewell, goodbye

Fast food didn’t stop being fast food over the last couple decades though. Taco Bell didn’t stop being Taco Bell. If anything it became Taco Bell even more so! But over that time not everyone maintained the same outlook on fast food. We’ve learned a lot more about how it can (or can’t) impact diet. It has become part of the “culture wars”. If fast food used to unite Americans, today it seems just as likely to be divisive, and Chandler gets in to this.

Drive-Thru Dreams came out in 2019, before the pandemic, before so much else happened. Today when we do rarely walk into a fast food place… well, I think about being in a Taco Bell somewhere off the interstate in Indiana, entering our orders on a touch screen, nobody else in the place, exchanging maybe three grunts with any workers. If this used to be a familiar and comfortable experience, well, now it’s like, wow, I’ve got to get out of here. And I think this is indicative of so much more in the world today. We go to a theoretical “third place” and we just want to get out of there as soon as possible. That’s not socially healthy.

Here’s how I know that Chandler was onto something, though. When the pandemic started and we couldn’t go anywhere… for a while… and then it seemed like, oh, maybe we can go somewhere… the first place we went as a family was a Dairy Queen. It was only the drive-thru. But we weren’t the only ones seeking normalcy from a Blizzard.

I found myself on a Zoom meeting this week with two women, J and J. We were discussing a lot of things - in a very meta moment, we were talking about networking in a networking session - and J brought up the idea of talking to people being the best way to learn things. She even said something to the effect that reading books is great, but she finds she learns more from a conversation.

Well, erm… Drive-Thru Dreams was the 7th book I’d finished in January. To be fair to myself, this usually happens in January. It’s cold out, we’re hunkered down, blah blah blah. But it still got me thinking about how so many of these books wind up being disconnected from anything else. (Nevermind that I’m making a point of connecting this book to other things!)

So now…

I talked way back in November 2022 about a group reading of Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano. And we’re doing it. More details forthcoming in February, but for now, the plan is, everybody read it, and we’ll have the first ever META-SPIEL Zoom, probably some time in late February. I don’t know if it’ll be just three of us or if dozens of you are going to try to jump in, but hey, if it goes well, we’ve got a bunch of other novels to go through too, right? I’m also going to try to get at least one very special guest involved. Not that you all wouldn’t be very special guests!

Meanwhile, there’s a group of four of us, former co-workers, who have been trying, and failing miserably, at setting up lunch for the last couple of months. Kids, meetings, holidays, cabinetry installations, viruses, maybe even aardvark attacks. Now, for our group, we’re kind of doomed to navigate these obstacles. But what’s occurred to me is that not every gathering has to be so meticulously planned. Zoom with y’all? Sure! But not everything has to be like that and involve so much technology.

Now, I’m not likely to walk into the weird vaguely Euro-wave coffee shop in La Grange and boomingly ask who there wants to talk about Lustron homes. (Though I do wonder what would happen if I tried that.) But I do think I’m going to try to show up for something involving strangers, where the setting is such that we have to talk to one another, but we don’t know what. Maybe that’s a hike, maybe that’s the writing group that meets at the library, maybe I can find a club which sits around and discusses the latest from Vending Marketwatch.

I wrote at the beginning of the month about happenings, and had categories: concerts attended, books read, sports contests attended, races run, spiels written. I realized that while my January total is high, almost all of them, 13 of 15, have been home happenings: 7 books and 6 spiels. And while this again might just reflect that it’s January… yeah. Maybe the guy in the United commercial had a point.

For a number of reasons, that United commercial doesn’t make sense anymore, if it ever made sense in the first place. It’s really quite funny to think that a boss would simply hand an employee an airline ticket like that. Forget your family plans! Forget your dog! You’re going to Cleveland! Tomorrow!

The fax thing is especially weird to me, because at the time the commercial originally aired, I was about the age my kid is now, and… who sent faxes? For what possible purposes? I feel like the commercial was informing America that we’d gone overboard on something that the vast majority of us had never seen in the first place!

Ahh, but I was familiar with a different kind of Fax… the video game:

Thanks to the Killer List of Video Games, I can now tell you that Fax came out in 1983, released by a company called Exidy, which was also responsible for the wonderful Pepper II, the game that inexplicably sucks me in when my offspring and I visit Galloping Ghost, the world’s largest arcade (in terms of number of unique games). And yet even with over 800 arcade games on hand, they don’t have Fax.

Fax was a trivia game. And it didn’t have a huge number of questions in its database, so at some point I suspect I essentially beat the game. You get a question right and a little dude climbs a ladder in a herky jerky motion, over and over, until, I guess, it gets tired of asking you questions.

The only place I’ve ever seen Fax was, absurdly, in the little arcade next to the convenience store at Holiday Acres, an RV campground east of Belvidere. My stepmom’s family had campers there so right around the time that the United commercial first aired was when I was playing Fax on a handful of summer weekends. I don’t remember what all else was in that little arcade, but most definitely they had Kangaroo, and I got to be really good at that.

Holiday Acres has a Garden Prairie address, and so apropos of nothing else, this is when I get to tell my Garden Prairie story, which is now about 20 years old, but feels like yesterday.

My sister somehow won two tickets to a Cubs game. This was actually a Cubs - Cardinals game! And the Cubs starter that day was Greg Maddux! And so I drove up from Normal to Rockford, and we drove on into Chicago, and we saw the Cardinals win and clinch the NL Central, and then after the game I think we went up to Devon and got Indian food, and I’m not sure that she liked it that much, probably because it wasn’t Korean, and then we drove back to Rockford, but at some point I got off of the interstate, and so we were heading westbound on U.S. 20 when we got to Garden Prairie. And when we got there, and there was the green sign saying GARDEN PRAIRIE, I pointed to it and said:

Garden Prairie, you know… this is the town that Billy Idol wrote that song about.

And she scrunched her brow in confusion, and I don’t think she actually managed to ask the question before I answered it for her, in my finest baritone:

Eyes without a faaa-aace

Her face literally froze, with her lips pursed not unlike Billy Idol’s, as though she was in one of those commercials where somebody is in the middle of spilling something but the scene freezes and someone else appears wearing an odd sweater talking about how all of this could have been avoided if only someone had remembered to send a fax.

I actually think I caused her to slip into suspended animation for a solid 27 seconds.

Of course I have to close this spiel with the video for “Eyes Without a Face”, but, you know, I watched it first, and friends, let me tell you: this may be the absolute dumbest video I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen solo Vince Neil videos. I realize that this a bold statement to make, that the competition is fierce, but good golly is this wretched. Consider yourself warned.