Two Tin Cans, And Some String...

Not that I have seen any children actually doing this for a long time, I remember back in the day when we used to get bored in the summer and try a number of things just to see if they would work or not. The good thing is, I don’t believe we ever totally destroyed anything, including ourselves, in the process. A variety of things we tried simply didn’t work the way we thought… Like trying to jump off the porch roof while holding onto two kites to see how far we could glide… You know, that kind of stuff…

I do remember one little experiment we tried that actually was some what impressive. We heard that if you took two tin cans, put a little hole in the bottom of each one, and tied the two cans together with some string, that you could talk back and forth like the telephone. Well, needless to say, Ma Bell was never threatened by our “breakthroughs…” But the cool thing about it (to us at the time anyway) was that it really worked. More or less… Of course, we quickly switched to more hi-tech stuff like walkie-talkies and CB radios!

Now jump ahead thirty plus years… We now can do without the string because our tin cans are able to talk to each other without wires. Between my cell phone and my wireless laptop, it is amazing what I can accomplish. (Ok… So a lot of the time I want to flush the cell phone and throw the laptop out the window…) But none the less, it is cool to be able to sit by the ocean, watching the waves role up and down the beach, have a beer in hand, and be talking to someone two thousand miles away stuck in their office. Or my personal favorite, sit outside in my porch swing while connecting back to my office getting some work done. Or, at times using a wireless internet card, turn a park into my office for the day.

I never realized how much I relay on wireless communications until I went on a vacation, a real vacation, last year. I went camping for almost two weeks at a county park along Lake Michigan. I was about 1 ½ mile outside the range of all the cell towers. No internet… No phone… Left the pager at home… I really suffered the first week. It was like I needed technological de-tox. But that second week was pure bliss…

Well, talk about something too long and it’s bound to catch up to you… I need to answer my cell phone… I wonder what would happen if I pulled out the battery and tied a piece of string to the phone…??? Happy communicating…