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FOLKLORT OF COMMUNICATIONS
OUTLINE
TIME
I. Clockwork
2. Time Off
I.
3. The Iron Rings
II. SPACE
1. Sea arid. Sky
2. On the Beach
3. "Sparks, the Mighty Man"!
I.
CLOCKWORK
You go into a long room with a high ceiling and full of
cruel white light. There's a racket like a million woodpeckers
the rat -a -tat -tat rat -a -tat -tat of maybe five hundred telegraph
keys, and the click -click -click click -click of the code ribbons
sprayed from the machines like confetti. The Woodpeckers are
sending cables, while other operators, their eyes. glued to the
moving tape, are snapping up dot by dash incoming messages hot
from the wires. The code messages received are simultaneously
translated into blue type and pasted up on Postal Telegraph
forms, which are dropped on a moving belt to be checked, classi-
fied and finally relayed to the district office for delivery.
You look around at the workers and you can hardly tell
them from their machines: Row on row of stiff backs with
pivoting heads, ballbearing eyes, and piston fingers moving
up and down.
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And all the clocks in the wide bright room stare them in the
face. The clocks, the clocks-- two, four, six, ten, twenty of
them. On square pillars, set eight feet apart down the middle
of the room, are hung the big round dials. No matter which
way you look, there's a clock with two black hands and a hurrying
red minute hand. "Time is the Big Boss here."
That's what Manny said. "Yeah," he said, "Time's. the Big
Boss".... (a little grayish fellow, with keen screwed up eyes
and a quick mechanical smile that he turns on and off suddenly...
and his speech is somehow that way too-- clipped into neat little
pieces that might be pasted on telegraph forms)
"Gimme a day, gimme an hour, fifteen minutes-- alright
five minutes away from time. Can you do it? Can anybody? God?
Naw. Look, ever stop to think? There's no way ylcan get out
of it. Not nobody. Ever stop to think? Y'know it's in my skin,
in my clothes, in my food, from those clocks. It's in my sleep.
I keep thinin' of it lately-- you can't get away from time.
It's from being fed on it around here. For fifteen years.
Fifteen years, five months and twenty..
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seven days-- and some odd hours. Prom eating hours, half-hours,
quarters, minutes and seconds. Seconds most of all. The seconds
digest hard. Look at the clocks. They're spilling minutes, and
the machines are gobbling them up. And the ops too. So many
seconds to read code, so many seconds to transcribe, so many to
paste up the strips, and one second to stamp the time on the form
received at 4:22 p. m. E. S. T. It's the same day and night, night
•c I
and day. The' machines never stop. Night work-- it's the worst.
I been on night shift, off and on. Electric light's hard on your
eyes. But you got to have at least 60 watts over your left
shoulder to read that little moving code strip. I've heard it
said it's supposed to be the hardest job on the eyes next to
diamond cutting. The strip runs along fast. Your eyes gotta
keep up with it, and the same time your fingers type it up in
word's. Now they've started printing a purple -blue on an off-
white strip. Supposed to be easier on the eye than black on
white.
Herd tell of guys that get stagger -blindness from reading
the tape. Everything moves backwards. As if you was on a train,
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your eyes keep on moving everything backwards. It's from
watching the tape jog along from left to right like it does.
Seventy-five per cent of the ops wear glasses around here.
Some wear green eyeshades, and some wear blinkers. Yeah,
they'll fix two pieces of cardboard on each side of their head.
Helps your eyes.
I knew a woman been on the phones thirty years. She got
so's she couldn't hear nothing 'cept telegraph sounds. This
was when they had ear receivers, instead of eye receivers.
That is, you intercepted the code through the phones, not off
the tape, and this woman got what they call telegraph deafness.
7/hat happened? She stayed on the job. It never hurt her work.
Fact is she got to be faster that way. Couldn't hear nothing
but telegraph signals, so no other sounds bothered her, and on
account of it she got a raise. For the gooq of the Company
they should figure out ap(operation to make every worker/hear
nothi
wod speed
and see noth,g but telegraph sounds and symbols. It
up prAuction.
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Take myself. I got what they call "the jitters" in
my -key finger. My hand will be resting on my knee or on
a chair arm, and that finger goes right on moving up and
down like it was transmitting signals-- dot dot dash, dot
dot dash-- reflex action. It goes away and then comes back
again. Ii used to it. But, y'know what? my wife will wake
me up at night and tell me for heaven's sake to quit pecking
around: I do it in my sleep. Wherever my hand's laying,
up and down goes that finger, pounding the key for Postal Tel.
used to think I'd pull out of this job. I never was
crazy about. But it's fifteen years, and now it might as well
be for life. There's not too much choice any more. Used to
be you could take it or leave it. Guys like myself were
boomers. If you didn't like a place, you'd up and take a
crack at the- boss, pick up your key and walk out. Hit the
next 'boom' town, show your key, and they'd take you on just
like that. Only a few guys knew their Morse, and owned a
key. Not like now with one or two companies holding the wires,
and training their own men. But I'm not kicking. I'm lucky,
in a way. You gotta realize it.. What with the ties--
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unemployment-- if a man crowding fifty holds a job anyplace,
he's a lucky son -of -a -gun.
It's only that I get to thinkin. And when I close my
eyes I see them clocks. All telling the same time. And
the sound of the machines clattering all together like that.
Hundreds of them aLl together. It's like waves in your ears
and wind in your eyes day and night. You'd think you'd get
used to it, but no, you keep on hearing it louder. Especially
off the job, the silence ain't natural, and you start listening
for it, and pretty soon you hear it, louder than ever. And
your mind jumping from second to second as if it was a clock
itself. And then I get to tninkin, what is time? A few
from Frisco to New York.)
seconds it takes to throw a messase/iimmin- But. 11—fou—
walk it, say without stopping, it takes two months. Then
they fro
say throw a wire risco at 1 p. m. It takes only a
few seconds t ew York, but When it's intercepted, it's
ri gy
4 p. m.E. S. T. Four hours just squeezed down to zero.
Nothin but some symbk on paper. And the same with clocks.
Ain't they only symbols? And the numerals nothin but black
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and red blobs. It's like a check that's no good. Only
maddersymbols on paper behind glass. I heard in a lecture
once how some fellow-- a philosopher he was-- said what time
=mt. "Time," he says, "is the minute hand on the Clock of
Eternity, that's kept in the watch -pocket of .God."
Oh, yeah, I says, and list what if there ain't no God? Tilen
there ain't no time either But say, my relief's up.
It's two minutes to one-- I gotta get back to the machine.