archie & mehitabel . . .

while in high school i was introduced to the poems of archie and mehitabel, a verse libre poet reincarnated as a cockroach, and mehitabel, an alley cat of somewhat loose virtues who may have been cleopatra in a previous life. the story goes that a writer inadvertently left a sheet of blank paper in an old manual typewriter overnight. during the course of the evening archie, the cockroach, discovered this and began writing by jumping off the typewriter carriage onto the keys. he was obviously not able to depress more than one key at a time, so all his work was in lowercase, with limited punctuation. he filled the page with his stories, and the following evening the writer would refresh the paper in the typewriter. his stories told of life in the back alleys, of the mice and the rats, and mehitabel the cat.

if archie's method of typing sounded torturous it was nothing compared to some of the poor souls i have seen trying to type in the office. i grew up in an era when, at school, girls typed, and boys did woodwork. what they forgot to mention to all of us poor boys was that in a few short years someone was going to invent the personal computer, and companies would buy them in their tens of millions, and grown men were going to be placed in front of these machines and be expected to use them. the inevitable was delayed somewhat thanks to the presence of more skilled secretaries, but with the advent of email one suddenly became personally responsible for ones own communication. and so the single digit typist was born. i recall one corporate ceo proclaiming that if he could not take a memo to the gent’s washroom then he did not want to see it. a year later he was gone. no-one was immune. visions of brawny rugger buggers sitting hunched over a keyboard turned into reality. the sight of a grown man, often a senior corporate manager typing an email, with one finger hovering over the keys in a posture not unlike auguste rodin's 'the thinker' statue, was something archie would have related to.

archie's work got me thinking about modern communication, and of how we are experiencing an explosion of inter-personal communication right now. while face-to-face communication has changed little, the use of new technologies has boomed, with people now using cell phones and their verbal, text messaging, and multi-media-messaging capabilities, email, internet user groups, voice-over-internet or skype, and the list goes on. whether we are communicating any better, or more meaningfully, is debatable, but communicating we most certainly are.

this boom in communications, and the technologies which underpin it has the potential to impact disabled people in two ways. firstly that it actually enables us to communicate by providing a tool which we can physically operate and use. secondly it provides a medium through which we can express ourselves. disabled people can now reach across the world, share experiences, warn of problems, and promote triumphs. as tools we now have features such as voice-dialing, one-touch dialing, bluetooth headsets which can receive and make calls without one needing to actually hold the phone, and just the other day i saw a phone for sale in a telkom store with huge key buttons to aid those with sight or spasm problems. then we can go hi-tech and get into voice recognition software for computers which allow you not only to dictate memos and emails, but also to control the functioning of the computer itself. software packages such as dragon naturally speaking, via voice, commodio, and macspeech all perform these functions, and one can even configure the standard windows xp operating system to recognise voice as well. ok, so it looks a bit odd issueing instructions to an inanimate object much like one would to your dog, but it works, and just think how confused the dog sitting next to you must feel . . .

archie would have given up one of his many legs to have had access to the technologies of today. he would not have been limited by only having a single sheet of paper per night, and his understanding of a mouse might have been quite different. he may not have lived to experience this newfound communication freedom, but at least we do not need to leap off typewriter carriages to get our message across.