January 9, 1997

Electronics scored a big success over the holidays. General Telephone hooked the ranch up to a microwave system working off a satellite in late November. Days later, a discount store supplied a fax machine slow enough to be connected to the new telephone system.

I was so excited over being relieved of maintaining seven miles of private line and enduring the delay of repairs on 15 miles of company-owned lines that the first day on the satellite, I contacted human voices on 16 answering machines without ever leaving the breakfast table.

My friends all have personal secretary services, or home answering machines, plus pagers and call forwarding devices. The messages add to the Christmas spirit. Senior generations have their children, or grandchildren, program the machines. I am always glad to hear young Peter has an adult voice and little Mary no longer squeaks, but has developed an authoritative tone from hollering at her kids and challenging her old man to a debate.

People have stopped being cute on the tapes. In fact, a few are so abrupt, they border on being curt. One number I call has a recording sounding like a cartoon character gurgling out his lines. On the old party line, we were unable to use an answering machine, but one of us was around to report who was out of town or busy shearing. Further back in history under the switchboard system of central office fame in Mertzon, operators knew everyone's business, including their blood type and breakfast preferences. Taped messages would have been a burden to those old sisters. By the time they retired, they knew more about the family history of Mertzon than the local historians.

The telephone company spent eight thousand bucks raising the aerial and hiring an electrician to run the wiring. I had already been prepped on the questions to ask the telephone men on faxes and on-line possibilities. I read enough in the computer columns to toss around a few words of the new vocabulary. From the way I talked to the telephone men you would have thought I was going to set up a system to back the airlines, or run the Department of Commerce.

But masquerades have short life on ranches, especially masquerades using modernism as a theme. On the afternoon they began testing, the temperature rose to 80 degrees. The guy working indoors started up to the back door just as my house cleaner Beto swept a small rattlesnake over the door sill. Snakes den up under the deep freeze in the winter, seeking the warmth of the electric motor.

Beto knows to sweep them outside to smash their heads. Even killing a small rattler like that one on a vinyl floor makes a mess. Wasn't a big snake, or a lively one, but he upset the engineers so bad, they quit work early without leaving a name or number to call for service. We needed an extra jack in the living room, however, I don't think the telephone men would have ever worked close enough to the foundation to poke a wire underneath the house, much less go under the house to do the job.

The telephone company hired a contractor to take down their end of the line from the highway out to the railroad siding at Sugg Switch. The salvage people offered to give us the old rotten poles and the green glass insulators. The insulators are worth good money in tourist towns. One out of 10 of the poles will do for temporary fencing. By the time we made a 10-mile round trip from the ranch dragging a flatbed to the right-of-way, figuring the insulators worth, say, six bits a dozen wholesale to an antique store, the loss on the posts looked like around two to three dollars apiece. Compared to raising beef cattle and finewool sheep on today's market, hauling second-hand posts seemed like a better deal and the insulator business sounded fantastic.

Sunspots interfere with microwave telephones, and smart-alecs in town disturb your peace asking about spot removers. On foggy mornings, the line goes dead. I read the satellites are 450 miles from earth. Next thing we will be looking into is buying a spaceship. The year looks promising for joining the electronic age. Beto knows now to be careful when city folks are around...