THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, January 24, 1996 TAG: 9601240381
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GUY FRIDDELL
LENGTH: Medium: 54 lines
If science can put a man on the moon, then why can't it . . . you may complete the sentence with whatever benefit you would have science bestow on us, such as:
. . . find a cure for the common cold?
But things don't often happen with just the turn of a phrase.
It took a city of scientists a decade, backed by billions of dollars and a national will, to take the steps through space that brought man to walk on the moon.
The United States became engaged in what amounted to a gigantic children's game of ``May I,'' in which a capricious leader grants three steps forward or two backward, or whatever, as half a dozen players seek to reach him first in a closing rush during a summer evening under the street light.
We shouldn't ask for so much to be achieved in a brief time, but gear some of our wishes for the short run in remedying infuriating little annoyances that beset us.
One such vexation is why the infernal telephone industry can't produce a phone cord that doesn't kink into a clump as snarled as a pot of spaghetti.
A long time ago, in the 1930s, the cord was only a couple of feet long, but as mankind evolved and reached for new horizons the phone cord grew.
The cord in this house, originally 8 feet long, snarls up and shortens to such an extent that one has to crouch down to within a foot of the phone as if one's throat is in the cord's grip.
It is not a phone, as the industry likes to put it, that is user-friendly.
It is decidedly hostile. One feels one's neck is in the clutch of an extortioner.
No problem, the wise reader says. Simply hold up the cord over one's head and let the receiver dangle while it unwinds in a few minutes on its own.
Wise reader, do you take me for a fool? (Don't answer that.) After trying to unfurl the cord, section by section, only to have it rewind itself, I climbed onto a table to hold the cord aloft.
But it had become so enwoofed in itself, a regular Hamlet of a cord, that every few minutes as one pulls and pushes the phone through loops, this way and that, it becomes entangled in a series of Gordian knots.
At one point, I had so tied myself in its coils as to seem a magician who has forgot how to get out of his stunt.
It would take the great Houdini himself to undo it in less than an hour and a half.
Let the phone industry cease trying to develop negligible services for which it charges another three bucks and concentrate in coming up with a phone cord that lies limp and straight and behaves itself and is not as aggressive as an anaconda. by CNB