Monday, October 13, 2008 Echaves: How we managed By Lelani P. Echaves Thinking Aloud
OVER 30 years ago, a fellow teacher enthused me into getting a personal computer. He knew I fancied gizmos. He said, “After trying the computer, you’ll wonder how you managed all these years without it.”
I’ve lived long enough to see the wonders and benefits of the computer age.
Having been a teacher and trainer all these years, I enjoyed making—during the pre-Power Point days—presentation materials using acetate films, and even stretching Instant Artist to its limits.
It was no small sense of triumph to conceptualize a message, design the graphic, and then get the different colors of special acetate films to convert the designs. At the cost of P25 per blank acetate film then, the materials for a full-blown presentation became costly. But then, Best Buy produced its alternative costing P12.95 each, and to me, it was “tuloy ang ligaya.”
Well, those were the days. Instant Artist has long been gone, marginalized by the newer kids on the block—Corel Draw, Photoshop, Visio, Excel, Desk Publisher, PowerPoint and all their annualized versions. Yet, while the desire to design remains, competing urgencies relegate that desire to the back seat, and you leave the designing to subordinates who have more time, and are younger and have more experience with these new programs.
That’s okay, until critical times arise. The commercial printer gives a tight timetable, his equipment has color and marginal limitations, and the person assigned to make the material doesn’t report or worse, goes irresponsible and declares a protracted Awol.
The five “piyem” deadline is nearing, it’s too late to learn Corel Draw, you refuse to predicate your sense of fulfillment and completion on the miraculous reappearance of the subordinate, and you take a deep breath and say, “Hmmmm… How did I manage all those years without the computer and the Corel Draw and its fancy co-creations?”
In fact, how did we manage all those years… without the calculator or Excel during budget-making time for the department, or while shopping or doing groceries? Some pull out their mobile phones, true. But the batteries could just conk out on times when you most need this phone feature. What’s to do?
Well, you remember those arithmetic flash cards. Your teacher flashed them too fast, you thought, faster than a second perhaps. And while you struggled with the previous card of 8 x 7, she had now flashed another card, 9 x 9. Some of your classmates may have been faster than you, but you vowed thereon to master the whole set of cards, starting with Table 2 and then up.
Fast-forward back to the present, the deadline from the printer. Worse, the computer just went “kaging.” You close your eyes and say, “I never let little things bother me.” You apply the “old way” of doing things, particularly how to telegraph to the printer how big the photo should occupy, and how to literally do the cut-and-paste of the “proof.” Of course, you make the deadline.
How did we manage all these years without the computer? We used our brains.
