That's Odd

Having attended school in the days when one couldn't take a slide rule into a math test because it was too much help, imagine my surprise when my emailed application and resume was rejected. Why? Because the organization only accepts them in submitted in person or delivered to its doorstep by the U.S. Postal Service. If only I could afford a little drone.

Dad gave me this bit of swag from his associates at The Boeing Company; SRAM is short-range attack missile, for those not in the know. Nuclear-tipped, thank you very much. On getting this obviously prized gift (since I still have it), I am quite sure I was appropriately in awe and grateful. I don't think I ever fully confessed to either of my parents that I couldn't figure out how to use a straight slide rule, let alone a circular one.

Wikipedia tells us that the slide rule began in the 17th century and went on until the 1970s as the primary tool for making scientific and engineering calculations. I was in college in the mid-1970s when Hewlett Packard (HPQ) and Texas Instruments (TNX) introduced their first pocket scientific calculators. I remember being impressed by my biology major roomie's TI and equally grateful that my philosophy and cultural anthropology classes required no such academic accessories.

Nowadays, I'm even more impressed that, on July 20, 1969 - seven years before the advent of scientific calculators - Apollo 11 landed on the moon, with our heroic astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin aboard, and returned those men with Command Module Pilot Michael Collins to Earth on July 24 (specifically, to the Pacific Ocean, 210 nautical miles from the storied NBC [nuclear, biological, chemical] weapons test and storage Johnston Atoll, and 13 nautical miles from the recovery ship, USS Hornet, also known for evacuating the last Americans out of South Vietnam). Despite my 15-year-old moodiness and superiority, I watched the news coverage with intent interest with my brother as my mother tied a red thread around a piece of the braided rug she was making. I still have the rug, too.

My parents were born the year that the car radio was invented, four years before stations could broadcast in FM. They likely didn't notice the inventions of nylon, synthetic rubber, the Slinky and Frisbee, and LSD because they were young and living through the economic devastation of the Great Depression. They and their generation saw The War to End All Wars, and the Second World War introduce means by which the globe could be swallowed in a nuclear winter. They watched as war - armed conflict between nation states - morphed into conflicts in Korea and Vietnam dragged on far longer, and with as dire and acute consequences as wars.

My mother died five years before the notion of war changed irrevocably and, in my opinion, permanently. But still, as it always has, war begets technologies, perhaps most noticeably these days, the drone. Envisioned and employed as a killing machine that separates the killer from the killed by many miles and tens of thousands of feet in altitude, we could soon have it deliver our books (how retro is that?) and, for that matter, our pizzas. 

I've reread this post several times as I've written, wondering to myself where it was going, never mind how I might get it there. So much rereading, in fact, that I'm tempted to rewrite and expand (lest anyone come away from this thinking the Frisbee started out as an instrument of war). All of this wandering and musing because I find it unfathomable that an organization doesn't accept email job applications. Well, it is a government agency so maybe not so unbelievable. 

At risk of rambling further, I'll just leave it at that. I need to head out to the post office to mail something.