Cards

Here in the Southern Hemisphere it happened overnight. I biked to work, skirting the city, completely unaware that the world had changed.

Perhaps I was late that morning because I can remember walking into the office to be confronted by so many faces turned toward me. My heart lurched when I saw the agitation and distress.

Ours was a very modern office. There were no desks, or heaps of paper, or In and Out trays. Instead there were thousands of cards in trays, and whirring, humming, clanking machines. Against the wall was a great tin cabinet that had dozens of small lights in different colours blinking and flashing, just as you saw in science fiction movies. Our job was to produce sets of punched cards that contained the details of customers and products to be fed into the machines, which in turn produced invoices for each order. As fantastic as it was the system was in the process of being superseded by the ultimate in office machines- a computer, but punched cards would still be central to our work.

That morning the office was buzzing in a different key, and everyone was looking at me. It must have shown on my face. "You haven't heard?" somebody asked. "She doesn't know," came another voice. They clamoured to enlighten me.

It was a shock. I had no interest in politics, or world affairs in those days, but Jack Kennedy was young and attractive, and he had a beautiful wife. It seemed incomprehensible.