They Call Me Captain Kirk

I had a fascinating and edifying conversation with my teenage son recently. He’s homeschooled. None of his friends are.

He had been tentatively hired to play and sing at a public function. I would ask him, from time to time, about the particulars of the job. He’d shrug and say he was waiting for information. When there was less than a day left before the scheduled date, I got a little peeved when I got the same answer — waiting to be told what to do; who to see; when to go. I received a little education while sorting it out with him.

The person in charge was ostensibly an adult but is more like a teenager running in place on the calendar. I asked him how he was communicating with her.

-I left a lot of messages on her Facebook wall.
-Facebook! Facebook? Why don’t you email her?
-No one has an email address, dad.
-Really?
-Well, they might, but they wouldn’t look in their inbox and answer you. There’s a part of Facebook that takes the place of email, though.
-Well, why don’t you leave one there for her?
-I left a half-dozen there. There’s no way to tell if anyone is looking at that.
-Why don’t you call her on the phone?
-She’s like my friends. She doesn’t know how to answer a phone.
-What do you mean? They all have $500 phones.
-They don’t know how to answer them.
-How can that be?
-They all are iPhone type slabs and they have to lock them so they don’t butt-dial 911 and their mother twenty-five times a day. They can’t unlock them fast enough to answer them.
-Well, why don’t you leave them a voicemail and tell them to call you back?
-Dad, they have no idea how to use voicemail. All their mailboxes are full and have never been listened to.
-You’re making that up.
-I’m not.
-Let’s find the phone number for the girl…er, woman that you need to talk to and call it.
    …the voice mailbox you’re trying to reach is full. Disconnecting.
-No one answers the phone?
-Dad, they text everything.
-But you’ve left “text” messages everywhere for your contact person.
-Texting isn’t for information, really.
-What does that mean?
-Dad, no one says much of anything when they text. It’s like a really elaborate handshake that goes on for a while.
-How so?
-A friend texts “hi.” You’re supposed to say “hi” back, but it’s bad manners to say more than hi, so that they can ask you how you are in little words without vowels in the next text, and keep the thing going for as long as possible. That’s why they don’t answer the phone, too, you can’t break the string of texting. Nothing really ever gets said.
-Well if all they do is text, why do they need iPhones? What can they do with them?
-Well, you could Google something, I guess, or watch a video, but they don’t.
-Why not?
-Watching even half a 240p video will put them over their data limit, so they won’t do it.
-Well they must do something with the screen.
-The girls all use it to look at Facebook, where they leave little text messages and ducklips phone photos for each other to look at while they text each other directly. 
-Someone must be using the phone to talk on the phone.
-No, if you want to talk on the phone you use Skype.
-Now we’re getting somewhere.
-My friends all get laptops given to them at school, and use them to Skype one another.
-They Skype in school?
-No, the boys play flash video games during class in school, and the girls…
-No, don’t tell me — they look at Facebook all day.
-Now you’re getting it dad.
-They must use them for something to do with school.
-Well, they’re Apples, dad. They’re pretty much useless.
-Well, don’t they use them to read books or Wikipedia or something?
-No one in school reads the books, dad.
-Come on.
-Well, a couple of kids read all the books that get assigned. The kid that was homeschooled until last year does, I think.
-You’d flunk if you didn’t read any books.
-There’s a website they use their laptops for that tells you what a book says without reading it. I don’t know the name of it.
-Cliff Notes?
-I think that’s it.
-The teachers would catch them.
-I think the teachers know but don’t care because it’s no skin off their nose.
-So the kids just plagiarize Wikipedia for their work?
-I think the teachers have a thing about Wikipedia so they’ve found some other place to copy and paste from.
-Doesn’t the school block that sort of thing?
-Are you serious, dad?
-Yes, I guess.
– I guess they try that sort of thing here and there but it’s a joke. They tried blocking something at YouTube once, and the kids just erased the backslash on the URL and it went right through. The technical ability of the school is strictly Wayne Newton-fan level.
-What do your friends think about you?
-They call me Captain Kirk because my phone folds in the middle and I talk into it.