What do a typewriter and Germany have to do with Twitter?
In fact quite a bit, but let’s step back for a second. How many times have you felt like you were wasting time? Seemed like you were doing something insignificant? Your actions have no relevance to your future goals?
In this season on “How I Met Your Mother” there have been a few reflections of this sort. For instance “What would have happened had I taken that cab?” or “What would have changed had I not been on that street corner at that time?”. The point that these statements make is quite simply that life is not a series of achievements or milestones, it is a series of interlocked microseconds where the affect of the previous billions and trillions are placed on the next infinitesimal.
Don’t believe me? Think about something fairly significant in your life. Today is my 4th anniversary with the company I work for. But how did I ever get this job? I heard about my company through a guest speaker in a course at UoG, i was introduced by the professor who I had known from a previous course, I only took that previous course because I had a choice of 2 electives and I had several friends in that course, I had made those friends from living in South Residence. In theory I could even pull this back farther as to why did I chose UoG, or Computer Science for that matter and that takes me back until the age of about 12, probably further. So an action that at the time may have been considered insignificant has resulted in me working for a company where I travel the world, get paid to do something I enjoy and work with a fantastic group of people. Some may say I am stretching it, but am I?
About 3 winters ago I had taken a day off of work to do some errands, Christmas shopping, and a few things for the fam. I woke up a little later than normal and went to have breakfast, out of milk for cereal I made eggs. i showered dressed and went down to my car. I got all the way down to my car and realized I forgot my phone, so I went back up. As I came out of my parking lot, as I was used to doing for work I turned left. About a city block went by before I realized I should have turned right, I started looking for a place to turn around when a police officer pulled in behind me and politely gave me a speeding ticket. Other than the obvious fact that the real blame is on me speeding… Can I blame the meeting of me and this officer on me taking the longer time to make eggs than a simple bowl of cereal? The reason the milk was empty escapes me now, as at the time it was an insignificant detail. What about forgetting my cellphone? That added time to my delay? Couldn’t my vacation day have been on a different day? Why was I at that intersection at that time on that day?
Twitter was limited to 140 characters for the highly publicized reason that SMS Text messaging standards is 160 characters, and Twitter allows 20 letters for a username. But why are text messages 160 characters? In the mid 80s a communications researcher working on a project to replace the pager sat at a typewriter and typed several common sentences he would have used his new gadget for. He found that almost all those sentences where less than 160 characters. He deemed that sufficient. When cellphones adopted this, bandwidth was slow and very tight, so they stuck with this to reduce overhead, and now that bandwidth is relatively cheap and plentiful we still use a non-scientific 80s limitation in a highly capable technology.
So when professors say that that the text message is ruining the way kids speak, perhaps we should blame that German researcher and his typewriter? Or we should blame the guy who hired him to research, or perhaps we should blame some other seemingly insignificant action that happened well before the 80s?
The problem is that this is all hindsight, who could know that me being stranded in a pub one evening would lead to me befriending a person who 2 years later is taking a trip with me to India? Who knew that by casually mentioning to my former boss I like to travel it would result in a series of events that moved me to England for 2.5+ years and counting?
I can think of so many examples in my life. Most I cannot even trace back because the moments were so fleeting, but realizing this just gives another reason why you need to go with the flow of life, don’t try and control everything, don’t fret about spilling a coffee or tripping on a sidewalk because who knows: That action may lead you closer to your dreams.