Nostalgia Sunday – Yashar Yashar

August 22, 2010 - 10:50 AM by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: A New Reality, General, History and Culture, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Life, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, Technology, Travel 

We are traveling this week, in the company of a GPS navigator named Koby. That is to say, our Global Positioning System has a selection of audio interfaces, each language interface has a name and gender identity (you can select a male or female voice), and the male Hebrew-language interface is called Koby.

Koby is a great asset for many reasons, first and foremost because he brings us to through unknown territories to our destination. (Well, he is a computer and that is his primary directive). But his absolutely genius feature is that if he makes a mistake — and he does err — we can get mad at him instead of at one another. So Koby saves relationships. Plus, it is so fun, for once, to yell back at that Israeli man-on-the-street who thinks he knows everything!

Think back… 20, 30, 40 and 50 years ago… or to last week, when you asked the man-on-the-street — let’s call him Yossi — for directions. “Okay, go to the right. Go to the right and then go to the left. Then go all the time straight, yashar, yashar, all the time in front of you. Go to the end. And okay, you will see it.”

This happens more often than not. Because the phrase “I don’t know” is anathema to Yossi and therefore directions you will get, right or wrong. Follow them and within some hours you should find yourself on the border of Lebanon, Syria or Egypt. They are, in fact, all the time in front of you.

At a certain point though, if you stay here long enough, this national tic, yashar, yashar, becomes familiar and then, weirdly, almost beloved. You start to wait for it and you’re disappointed when it doesn’t come. Thankfully, there is another version, in which Yossi ends his litany with “Then you ask someone where to go after there.” And indeed, that is true. You can always ask another Yossi and start playing the game over again.

But since we do have to reach our destination eventually, we love Koby, although he and his ilk are replacing Yossi and his yashar, yashar as the national directional fallback. Mourn not for Yossi, however, whom I envision as your typical gadget-happy Israeli man. He already has GPS installed in his car, his jeep and his running shoe. He’s no freier*.

I should point out that whoever did the recording for Koby is a very practiced radio-TV announcer with perfect pronunciation. But, in a way, I wish the manufacturers had given us a third option: Yossi man-on-the-street. Then we could really go to town. If it were to be truly realistic, however, Yossi would cuss us out with better, juicer phrases — as in this advertisement for the MIRS GPS, where the driver gets a big surprise when he misses a turn. Truly a slice of Israeli life: high technology combined with Jewish guilt.

And another one, just for fun, because it’s sort of in English:

*Usually translated as “sucker”, “patsy” or “loser” the word deserves a column all on its own, so more on “freier” another day. Let’s just say, in short, that it’s everything an Israeli doesn’t want to be.

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Nostalgia Sunday – Asimonim

July 12, 2009 - 10:21 PM by · 8 Comments
Filed under: General, History and Culture, Immigrant Moments, Israeliness, Nostalgia Sunday, Pop Culture, Technology, War 

israel_telephone_token_backNostalgia is defined as “longing for something past” and the asimon, or Israeli telephone token, was a beautiful object for which I’m quite nostalgic. Not only did asimonim have a practical function — to make calls from public phones — they were attractively decorated with the image of a phone dial and had a hole in the middle, so you could string them on a leather thong to wear around your neck. Or, as I did, impaled on a large safety pin and hooked onto a belt loop. All very punk.

And here’s something I’m not at all nostalgic for: scrounging around desperately for an asimon, either because you miscalculated the length of your call, or — in most cases — because the public phone decided to eat your last precious token. This after having waited in line for 45 minutes to make the call.

bezeq-public-phone

I thought perhaps it was just me imagining conspiracy theories but it turns out that there actually was a national shortage of telephone tokens! This was between 1973 and the post-Yom Kippur War era, when asimon consumption shot way up, and 1981, when the Ministry of Communications found a way to manufacture asimonim locally instead of farming out the work to our friends at Vereinigte Deutsche Metallwerke AG (VDM). (Rumor had long had it that the arrangement with VDM was part of a reparations deal closed between the Israeli and German governments. Now, there’s a conspiracy theory to mull over).

In any case, by the time 1984 rolled around and the Ministry of Communications privatized Bezeq, there were asimonim aplenty and the black market in phone tokens (yes, there was one) had all but shut down. On the other hand, there was a wave of phone box break-ins. To stop the madness, Bezeq introduced the phone card in 1990, and again, war gave the new technology an unexpected boost in 1991 when the first Gulf War created new demand for international phone calls — mostly placed by those of us in sealed rooms trying to find out from relatives and friends abroad what CNN was reporting and which way the SCUDS were heading.

israel_telephone_token_2_types_front

According to an excellent online article (in Hebrew) by Moshe Lipner, “Israel’s Telephone Tokens“, at their peak, there were 13,000 token telephone boxes around Israel. By 1999, these had been replaced by 22,000 Telecard phone boxes. These can still be found, as can phone cards, but their presence has declined considerably with the massive public switchover to cell phone technology — and who can blame the public for wresting itself out from under Bezeq’s monolithic thumb?

Meanwhile the modest little asimon has become a collector’s item on Ebay and an objet d’art. Given my penchant for wearing asimonim, I think I may need to get a pair of these:
israel_telephone_token_cufflinks

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