Jules Heartly | November 2022

It was a late November day, sunny but with a cool breeze that made the temperature feel a freezing minus twenty while the street thermometer read 36.  I  was on the far side of the restaurant, admiring a selection of autumn flowers placed at the  dinner table.  I was early for a change.  My invitees hadn’t arrived yet. There would be 6 of us, my two girlfriends, their mothers and one of their aunts.

We had decided to have a “Friendsgiving” celebration, sort of a Thanksgiving reunion, but not on a Thursday and not at anyone’s home. While I waited, I paid attention to the patrons coming into the restaurant.  A young couple sat by the window,  they looked at each other and smiled.  Their hearts seemed  swelled with an optimism that seemed akin to the brisk winds visible outside. But a few minutes later they were immersed in their cell phones.  They would take a few seconds off it to glance at each other.   

A group of lively friends arrived and, after stopping at the bar to greet the bartender, they headed to a table opposite to where I was sitting. Like in a cue, all at once, they checked their cell phones for a few minutes and then put it  away in a foldable cell phone basket, one of them had pulled  out of his bag.   I liked the gesture.  After all, when planning our Friendsgiving rendezvous, we had agreed not to even bring the cell phones with us to the restaurant. Having that foldable basket I thought could’ve been a better option though, since I had been waiting a good 15 minutes, and I had no way to check how soon the rest of my party would arrive. 

A rush crowd came into the restaurant all at once.  My eyes followed each group to their assigned tables.  Coming in as the last group were my table mates!  Welcoming hugs dispersed, we jumped into our catching up stories.  One of them caught my attention. 

It was about a Spaniard, Carlos San Juan de la Orden, a 77-year-old person, who started a petition to the banks to increase in-person services for Senior Citizens.  His request along with the 647,855 supporters who signed the petition, was based on the frustrating experience dealing with broken ATM’s, senseless cashiers who treated him like an idiot because he didn’t do online banking, or when talking to a  bank rep asking to get issue resolution being forced to  calling another help desk ( the bank online help) just to be asked to find answers online in their internet page.  A sign of how technology has dehumanized services -among other things-, and how damaging it has been for senior citizens.

With the slogan “I am a Senior NOT an Idiot!” Carlos San Juan dela Orden was able to get the Spain Minister of Economy to pass a law for banks to enhance their protocols to include more human (in-person) services to Senior citizens and deactivate the need for online communication as the only tool to get their banking related problems solved. 

Narrating the story and its  background took my girlfriend a good 20 minutes, and regardless of the excitement of it, I could not help to notice that during all the time I had been at the restaurant, I hadn’t been given a Menu.   I turned around and the people who had arrived at the same time my friends had, were already enjoying their drinks and appetizers. 

I kindly called an approaching waiter and I explained my concern.  She smiled and pointed to the corner of the table.  “That is the #QR CODE.  Use your cell phone and get the link to the menu, then you may place your order.” She said.  

We do not have smart cell phones, my girlfriend’s mom promptly replied.

And we didn’t bring ours,” I added, 

“Could you provide us with a printed menu?”

The waiter rolled her eyes, as if we were asking her to get us Taylor Swift’s tickets. “ I will see if there is one around, but I doubt that is the case.”

A few minutes later, Karen, the waiter,  brought a beat up black and white old copy of the restaurant’s menu.  “Just bare in mind, the prices listed may not be the same today”  she scolded us.  “And I don’t even know if I will remember your order, since we NO longer have pads to write on the customer’s dining orders”. 

We looked at each other, without spontaneously resolving whether to laugh or be upset.  The wind speed had increased outside, and the colorful autumn leaves accelerated their fall, some of them landing first in the window. I imagined picking up some, chasing their different color tones and saving them later pressed inside my books.   

“Are we staying or leaving?” my girlfriend Mayte  asked  and are we starting  a petition too? “ We are NOT Young neither OLD but choose not to USE our Cell phones!” 

We laughed and decided to stay and talk more about how technology is moving us away and away from writing with our hands, using Calligraphy or learning to do so.  Depriving us from the intimate encounter with a pen/pencil sliding on a piece of paper, communicating, expressing, interpreting, conversating about something we may not even know at the moment, when molding words on a notebook.   Stripping us from the sensation of delightment, liberation, inner-connection, creation, hand writing provides us with.

And that, my friends, is what brought me to this blog.  The desire to trigger, to reactivate,  to spark in other people’s mind the unique emotional  creative connection handwriting brings out. One I hope is strong enough to drive you to request a Menu in the restaurant instead of accepting  a QR Code, but more than that to live the experience itself and instead of typing take the risky adventure of creating a handwritten note,  create a drawing(yes,with your hands!). 

When you do so, you would be preserving a very ancient historical communication tool we ought to keep and prevent its extinction!  The handwritten communications!  The Hand painting Art!

I would love to know your thoughts about this subject.  Let me know!  Send me a comment, write me a note! 

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