Car windshield wipers in action at the stop light by the flyover bridge on the Portmore highway near Marcus Garvey Drive in Kingston. - file

THE EDITOR, Sir:

A FRIEND of mine recently complained that one of the windscreen-wiping chaps at the top of Hagley Park Road slapped her Mercedes Benz with his plastic wiping 'thing' because her windscreen wipers came on just as he started to spray his water on to her windscreen.

She protested to me that she hadn't turned on the wipers at all. It was the rain-sensitive wipers on her Mercedes that automatically came on.

I tried to soothe her, saying that many innovations, such as rain-sensitive car wipers, will not be well known in Jamaica. Her son laughed, adding that even some of our two-footed car wipers are not rain-sensitive.

This episode reminded me of the farm workers who went seek to work in Canada to irrigate the wheat fields. After all, it's a simple enough job to water the wheat fields, right? Not so. They were all turned back because none were computer-literate. Yes, to water the wheat fields in Canada you have to operate a computer in an office to tell the system how much water, how much of which additives to add to the mix and for how long, all depending on the time of year. It is a precise science.

We then discussed the time when they wanted to add a button to the dashboard of the bullet-proof Jaguar car that was driven by the British High Commissioner a few years ago.

At the time there was no Jaguar dealership in Jamaica but they took it to a major garage anyhow. When the mechanic pulled off the dashboard and looked behind it, all he could see was one fibre-optic strand, now broken, which ran from a computer system to feed the whole dashboard. Apparently, the mechanic shook his head, saying that he had never seen anything like that before, and just screwed the now defunct dashboard back into place and left it.

I am, etc.,

BARRY MORGAN

Morgan500@hotmail.com