(On the road at an international information conference, Business Edge columnist Tom Keenan sends his despatches from the front lines.)
I am NOT a blogger.
The idea of somebody documenting every brainwave and bowel movement strikes me as narcissism gone wild. However, I AM a huge fan of travel writing in the tradition of Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux. I hope this chronicle will be viewed as less of the former and more of the latter.
* December 7: Check in early for the flight. Then I realize the Air Canada folks have not checked my passport. I present it to the lounge guy, who flatters me by saying “it’s OK, I know you.” I insist, since I’m pretty sure some bit in the AC computer will keep me off the plane if we don’t do this. AC guy flashes me a look of considerable alarm. “You don’t look quite enough like your son.” Ach, I have grabbed the 16-year-old’s passport. It is now 17:25 for an 18:00 flight to Frankfurt.
Suffice it to say you CAN get home (near downtown) and back to the airport in less than half an hour, but it takes a toll on your heart, the cab’s tires and the poor driver.
Techno moral: If they want to implant a wireless passport chip into my skin, I’m ready, as long as I can turn it on and off.
* December 8: Here in Switzerland, and I realize why the Swiss will never again lead the world in information technology. They did give us the Swiss Army Knife, and the World Wide Web, invented by Tim Berners-Lee while he was at the CERN nuclear lab. But now, the Swiss are manacled to the world’s worst computer keyboards. The Y and Z keys are switched for obscure reasons, and making that all-important @ requires a finger-bending ALT GRP/2 combination. Except on a Mac, where it’s different.
Techno moral: Ditch the keyboards and mice completely. The Japanese here are showing off new “pinwheel” technology for data input.
* December 10: Today, I discover Swiss overpasses, not the concrete kind but the paper variety. They come from the devil mind of some Swiss bureaucrat, probably the same one who invented five different entrances to the conference Plenary Room. A hyperactive Japanese journalist and I show up at the media entrance five minutes before the session, only to be sent off looking for overpasses to put on top of the chip-bearing smart cards that we are already wearing.
Side note to Hon. Jean Chrétien: You are a toad. I know for a fact you were in Paris last night breaking bread and foie gras with Jacques and Bernadette Chirac. Since you were in the neighbourhood, you could at least have joined the other kings, crown princes, dictators and presidents here at the summit. Your presence would have given me an automatic overpass! I finally wangle one, run back and find the room secured. (A guy with an Uzi is always gonna win over reporters, even reporters with overpasses.) I enter after the crowd has thinned down from several thousand to maybe 200. The education minister of Iceland just doesn’t command the same attention as Kofi Annan.
* December 11: Just after midnight. I have subsisted long enough on the ham and cheese baguettes passed out in the media centre. I spot a lively place called Zara 2001 offering Eritrean food, whatever that is. The 2001 gives me some confidence that they have been feeding people successfully for a while.
I walk in and 50 or so faces look up. Black ones. All of them. Something we don’t often see in Canada. I sit down, take off my tie and order a beer. The place breathes a collective sigh of relief and goes back to card games, drinking and talking on cellphones. I dine on Shuro, something that was once peas and spinach and spices but is now a paste served on spongy flat bread. I’d love to take a photo, but sense that there are some people here who would not appreciate that.
Techno Moral: Many decry the way people tend to segregate themselves online. Is it really that different in real life?
* December 12: It’s just after midnight. I decide to try to track down the protesters in their lair at L’Usine. Get directions off MSN. Can’t follow them because half the streets don’t have signs and they keep changing names. Eventually I do find the place. Various counter-culture types are within, but instead of protesting they are partying to techno music and watching the latest video from Bad Monkeys (think: JackAss The Movie).
Then, a disturbing sight: several one-thousand franc notes ($1,000) are produced, followed by a large, large bag of white powder. Not wanting to be in the presence of a kilo of cocaine, I head for the door.
Techno Moral: If I had that chip implanted I would not have gotten lost. Then again, did I really want to get here any earlier? No amount of Internet wizardry is going to solve our fundamental social problems, but at least we can try not to make them worse with technology.
