Switching Off

Switching Off
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday January 31, 2015

Above the clatter of cups and the clamourous crowd, the girl’s laugh hee-hawed across the cafe. Heads swivelled in her direction. We customers grinned at each other. She was young, sitting with friends, posing for group photos, her phone bobbing on the end of a selfie-stick. After each press of the shutter, she’d retract the stick, examine the photo and bray loudly at the result.

My gentleman neighbour, roused from his newspaper, leaned towards me and raised one grey eyebrow:

“I don’t know what’s funnier,” he said drily, “that crazy laugh, or those stupid selfie-sticks!’

We nodded at each other in smug agreement. Then he flapped his newspaper and I resumed clattering away on my second hand laptop, relieved to be in such sensible company.

I eyed the girl with her selfie-stick. She was now laughing hysterically, her friends crowding round her phone. Her delight was infectious. I felt a small stab of shame. Everyone but me seems to be high on gadgetry, I thought. And here I am, a laggard, scrabbling to keep up with the latest gear. Is it just me who’s struggling to master the devices I already have?

Last week, my Macbook Pro had a seizure, then blacked out on my desk. I palpated every button but no sweet little apple appeared. In my online darkness, there was only gloom: no email, no Google, no Facebook. The earth was flat again.

What if I’d paralysed my laptop with my own ineptitude? Rather than parade my electronic failings before all-knowing husband, I made a dash for the Apple store. The lanky door-geek waved me towards the Genius Bar. Cradling my lifeless laptop to my bosom, I consulted the brainiac behind the counter.

“Hmmm” he said, fingers flying over my grimy keyboard. I cringed as he frowned at the missing Ctrl’ button.

“I’d say your superdrive’s crashed,” he said, flipping my laptop over to inspect the serial code birthmarked to its bottom.

“It looks pretty worn out. We’ll see what we can do.”

I slunk home.

Seeking comfort from teenage son, I told him, “The genius guy called me a late adopter. Or was it a slow adaptor?”

“More like a slow learner,” he hooted, and re-clamped his headphones to his ears.

Here’s my problem: I’m not wired for rapid uptake. I don’t covet an iPhone 6. I still use my phone for making calls. (Please, no more apps!) I’m content to read books made from paper. No-one has convinced me I need a personal GPS. I’ll happily stay lost until I’m found. But I live in fear of being left behind.

Teenage son is a tech-head, his Y chromosome pre-programmed for gadgetry, like my husband’s. I see them hunched together, their rapturous faces reflected in the vast touch-screen monitor in the loungeroom.

“What are you two doing?” I ask.

“Checking out Google Glass.”

“Google Glass?”

They roll their eyes in unison.

“They’re specs with tiny built-in computers. Operated by voice command.”

I wander off to hang out a load of washing, convinced I’ll never catch up. By the time I return, my two smallest children have joined the duo, having already absorbed the basics of electronic miniaturisation.

Why does it take all my nous (and the limits of my patience) to juggle the three remotes needed to download a movie with Apple TV? My phone and tablet hustle me with their endless stream of posts and tags, links and feeds. Staying connected is exhausting. And oddly dissatisfying. I waste valuable time attending to the backlog to clear a path for uninterrupted work. I have become hobbled to my machines.

My teenager’s online social life started with a trickle and is now an electronic flood. Instagram and Facebook have locked onto his likes and dislikes and deluge him with electronic prods and prompts. His phone beeps for him continuously. He has been conditioned like a Pavlovian dog. He’ll interrupt homework, a conversation, even dinner, to check his gadgets. In fits of pique, I’ve silenced his phone in a drawer. Slammed shut his laptop. The virtual world never sleeps, and if I gave him free reign on his screens, neither would he.

The cyber-world is a disconcerting place for the uninitiated. Mum claims to have no need for email or internet. At 78, she still licks stamps, pays bills by cheque, finds an electrician in the Yellow Pages and navigates by UBD. But she’s adept at texting, and will spell out her day’s adventures with an SMS treatise. She’d be horrified to be labelled a Luddite, but claims learning new gizmos is tedious and she has better things to do, like the watering. She’s right about that, at least. I’m sure I had more freedom before computers made my life simpler.

Losing Control

Losing Control
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday May 10, 2014

I am at war with my machines. This week, I am at choke point with the toaster. It cannot contain the crumbs from even a single slice of bread. Its crumb tray is like men’s nipples, a useless feature that should have been engineered out of the final design.

I’ve taken to upending my toaster over the sink and shaking it violently until I hear its innards rattle. When it cannot cough up another single speck of bread dust, I give it one last slap to remind it who’s boss and plonk it back into its corner of the kitchen bench.

Next morning, as I pull my machine out to toast my slice of kibble rye, I see it has dumped yet another load of sooty crumbs and flame-grilled raisins from some dark orifice.

I’m already cheesed off with the dishwasher  – a computerised princess who recently gagged on a pea. Or so the repair-man told me when he asked me for $180 to remove it. For three days, a fetid pool of bilge water had refused to drain from the bowels of the machine. To stem the smelly tide, I transferred cupfuls of grey swamp-water to the sink, then got down on my hands and knees and groped around in her murky fundament, hoping to release the blockage. The repair-man thanked me for doing the dirty work and sieved out a lone pea, swollen and grey, but capable of gumming up a sophisticated machine several hundred times its size. 

I’m afraid the house is ganging up on me. The doorbell has begun checking if we’re home by ringing itself at two in the morning. The first time it happened, I was startled awake by the loud peals echoing down the hallway. Suspecting a brazen burglar, my bloke leapt out of bed and began fumbling about in the dark for a weapon. He stumbled over teenage son’s tennis bag dumped by the front door. Fuelled by adrenalin and primed to inflict some racquet abuse, my bloke wrenched open the door brandishing a Junior Prince Warrior, rrp $59.  A cool breeze invited itself in and gusted down the passageway, slamming the hallway door and waking all three children.

Two nights later, our midnight caller struck again. There were phantom chimes during the day as well until my husband ripped the doorbell from its casing. (Visitors now spook us by magically appearing on the back veranda when their volleys of doorknocking go unheard.)

I keep reading scary stories about how our machines will soon do our thinking for us. Human evolution will stall as our gadgetry becomes superior. Bollocks! All my appliances are still hopelessly dependent. Their shortcomings might push my buttons but they won’t do a thing if I don’t push theirs.

We’re yet to get a robotic vacuum cleaner though friends say they’re marvellous. I’m all for handing over my gritty floors to a robo-maid who works tirelessly through the night. My husband says they’re a stupid gimmick and a Hoover needs a human to do a decent job. (This from a man who has never used one.)

I can remember when chess champion Gary Kasparov lost to IBM’s Deep Blue in that pivotal victory of machine over man. But that was twenty years ago and I’m not yet being chauffeured by a driverless car. My self-cleaning oven still won’t clean itself.

Boffins predict by 2030, computers will have all but disappeared from sight. They’ll be everywhere yet nowhere, ubiquitous yet hidden, just like electricity and running water, and my children at bedtime. Apple’s iCloud will follow us silently and seamlessly, absorbing our thoughts as we think them. (My dirty ones will stream live to iPorn).

Right now, my computer is attached to an overcrowded power board via a spaghetti junction of cables. The wi-fi regularly goes awol. It’s hopeless upstairs. Last week, I discovered my 13-year-old squeezed into the corner between his bedroom door and his wardrobe, crouched over his laptop. “I’m doing my maths homework. Really Mum! This is the only spot where the wi-fi works.” For once, I believed him.

The next morning at 6am, still half asleep, I nearly garrotted myself on the ethernet cable which teenage son had strung overnight across the stairwell. “What the heck?” I demanded, pointing to the blue cable looped to the walls with globs of Blu-Tack. “Oh, that!” he said. “I ran the internet cable upstairs to get Google.” (All the technology in the world means nothing if you have a teenage boy at the controls.)

For now, I’d like to think I’m still the boss of my machines. At least until my smartphone outsmarts me and incites a mutiny amongst my appliances. That’s when the phantom doorbell will give the signal, the freezer will have a meltdown and my coffee machine will serve nothing but decaf.