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As often happens, the Target asked the women. Did he have to write to the computer (ZIP code and all) and correct its error? "Of course you do," said his wife. "Of course you do," said his daughter. "That's how you raised us." Well, it wouldn't do any harm to reflect a little longer, the Target thought, and see what the computer did, if anything. While the Target reflected, the computer secretly took back its $1,000. In the next accounting it sent to the Target, it did not admit it was withdrawing any money, simply informed him that his balance was $1,000 lower than it had been. "Never apologize, never explain" was the guideline attributed to the great Plato scholar Benjamin Jowett. The computer agrees and approves.
The trouble with the nine-digit ZIP code is that it is not printed on the Target's checks or any of his other papers, only on corporate letterheads. To join in the spirit of the computer age, the Target must either write all these new numbers in his address book or remember his family and friends at a rate of nine digits each. The price of friendship, like everything else, keeps going up. It is possible, with considerable struggle, to remember that a daughter in California answers to 90405, but if it becomes 90405-7236, the silences may grow longer.
Consider telephone numbers. TIME has answered to JUdson 61212 for decades, and even though it long ago shifted to the more fashionable but actually identical 586-1212, Judson is what keeps the number in the Target's head. Actually, most TIME lines now start with 841, but the secret is that you can remember the number by thinking of it as Time-1 . Then you have to remember that headquarters is in New York City (212). That makes ten digits in all, so it can be done. But how often, for how many people? The Target can remember that Los Angeles is 213, but then what was the rest of it?
The reason it's so hard to remember is probably that the Target's brain is crammed to the rafters with useless information. He remembers that the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes occurred in 1685--yes, exactly 300 years ago, just like the birth of Domenico Scarlatti--and that Pete Reiser's batting average in 1941 was .343, and that the longest word in the English language is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. All this information is probably of less value than one California telephone number or nine-digit ZIP code, but it got into his head first and won't go away to make room for newcomers. Come to think of it, how many California telephone numbers could one memorize if one knew nothing else whatever? Then one would be what is known as an idiot savant, one of those remarkable creatures who can tell in a second what day of the week was Christmas in, say, 1846 but have difficulty learning less esoteric things.
Though it is easy enough to grumble about the nine-digit ZIP code, the Postal Service has its reasons, all of them very expensive. Facing a tidal wave of 131 billion pieces of mail annually, including all those catalogs that you throw away, the Postal Service has just compiled a deficit of about $300 million, most of it in labor costs. New nine-digit mail-sorting machines will eventually get the system into the black, it says.