How Technology Changes Things

I was going to do other things with my evening. I was going to work on an article about National Train Day, which is on May 10th, and on why you should join the Green Team, and nonsense like that. In fact, I was finished with the first paragraph when the phone rang.

It was the police, calling in regards to our son. At first we thought he'd done something wrong, but we quickly found out that he and his friends had been in a car accident. The car had flipped over, skidded 150 feet on its roof, and crashed into a tree. One of the kids involved had been hurt badly enough to be sent to the trauma center in Atlantic City, and the other three (including our son) were various shades of 'hurt, but not critically'. They'd been taken to a hospital located down in Manahawkin, approximately an hour from our house, that we'd never heard of before.

Technology changes things dramatically. We looked up the hospital's address and phone number using the Internet, and called them immediately after getting off of the phone with the policeman. We have two lines in the house, and call waiting; while we called the hospital to make sure that Steve was being brought there, the police called back because they couldn't find out the number of some of the other kids' parents -- without call waiting, they would've been unable to contact us, and probably wouldn't've been able to contact the other kids' parents to let them know what happened until much later. Our daughter called up one of their friends on the other line to get the needed phone numbers, and we relayed them to the police, while alternately talking with the hospital people in order to get some idea of where the hospital was.

We piled into the car - nevermind that it was the middle of the night, it was raining, and we were dangerously low on gas because we hadn't expected to make an hour-long trip to and from a place we'd never been in the middle of the night. We used a cell phone while driving to the hospital (technically, our daughter did) to call the hospital again, to verify that Steve was indeed there now. We found out that he was not critically injured - something that doubtless saved us from reckless driving on the way there - and gave permission for the hospital to treat him.

We stopped at a twenty-four hour gas station, where we filled our tank with $30 of gas (about 2/3 of a tank these days, but what can you do?) and stopped into the convenience store to pick up some caffeine and a pretzel (not good for your health, but invaluable in lowering stress levels), and to hit up the ATM (no surcharge at this particular location) for money to pay for tolls. Then we used our GPS system to help us find the hospital -- its illuminated surface was much more effective than the hastily scribbled directions, and its calm voice was much better than mine alone would ever have been.

We made our way to the hospital, and eventually arrived there, where Steve had indeed been treated -- he wasn't badly hurt, a testament in part to the excellent design of the modern car he and his friends were riding in. The airbags failed, but as it turned out, none of them had had to go to the trauma center, and for the most part they were just bruised, cut up, and banged up. Steve received a prescription that was printed out via a laser printer; none of the confusion associated with doctors' handwriting in this medical institution. They were all a little bit poleaxed by the realization that they very possibly could have been killed by the accident, but I managed to lighten the mood by offering to take a picture of them with my digital camera. They smiled, and posed like tough punks instead of the unsettled teens they'd been moments beforehand.

We gave Steve and two of his friends a ride back home, since they all lived near us and they all wanted to hang out and decompress after their brush with mortality. On the way home (made possible through GPS plotting), Steve called up his other friends using the cell phone to reassure them that he was okay, that everyone was okay, and that they weren't too badly messed up. We listened to the radio on the way home, flipping between stations, joking about the humor factor of various tunes. We stopped at another 24-hour convenience store on the way home, where Laura and I bought the teens some snacks and drinks -- again, something to help put them at ease -- before we dropped them all off at a mutual friend's house (a friend who'd been crying and thinking they'd all been mangled or killed) on our way back home. And now, in part to help decompress, I'm writing this article on a computer and posting it through the Internet to a website, where others can read it and talk about it.

Technology has changed our world -- not always for the better, but often. Phones, radios, GPS devices, printers, computers, the Internet... So many pieces of technology helped turn something that could have resulted in sadness and death into something that merely resulted in a funny-disturbing story. While sometimes I worry about what technology gone wrong can do, there are times like this that I think technology isn't all bad.

I'll worry about the Green Train tomorrow. Tonight, I'm just grateful that my son is bruised instead of broken.