Story and Metaphor

This talk about the metaphors reminds me of a story a friend of mine told me once (and what are stories but metaphors with proper clothes on).

A friend of mine graduated with a computer science degree and ended up starting an internet café in Lahore, Pakistan. So he’s running this café one day when an old lady walks into the shop and walks up to him and tells him she wants to write a letter to her son who lives in some other country (let’s say Papa New Guinea for conveniences sake).

So my friend agrees to write the email for her and send it of to her son. So he sits her down next to a computer and she starts dictating to him. And when he thinks she’s done he clicks on send and mails it off.

Suddenly, the old lady gets all angry and starts asking him where the letter is gone, she wants to add something, say a proper goodbye. “Didn’t your family teach you how to end letters”, she insists. So my friend offers to send of another email adding the stuff she wants to but she won’t have any of it. She insists that he can run up to the roof and grab the email before it fly’s off. My friend, with his computer science degree, starts explaining to her that email is instantaneous, and it’s already been converted into bits and packets and those are irrecoverable. Angry, the old lady storms off leaving my poor friend sitting at the computer.

Now I understand that the mental model the old lady had in her head was that email was like regular mail with except faster and cheaper. From her point of view what you had to deal with was someone to ‘send’ it that was different than the postman but essentially did the same job. The message itself wasn’t any different because in her perception the medium had not changed. Now what my friend should have said was, like a mailbox once you drop the letter in, you can’t take it out unless you have the key. And that he didn’t have the key. “It’s somewhere in Amreeka” (America in urdu). ; ) …

So I smiled at my friends amazement that the old lady couldn’t appreciate the complexity technology while thinking he couldn’t appreciate the simplicity of metaphor.