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.

Along for the Ride

Along for the Ride
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday September 20, 2014

A green speck appeared on the crest of the hill. “Bus!” I shouted to the kids, Small daughter and her brother (plus 4-year-old Finlay on loan from up the road) hopped down from the park bench and teetered on the kerb, desperate to be first to recognise the bus numbers.

“That’ll be the 107,” said a spry fellow who was leaning against the bus-stop, dressed like a man who hasn’t cared about fashion since 1970. Beneath his herringbone flat-cap I noticed the bulbous nose of a man prone to thirstiness. His polyester Bermudas were as short as his socks were long. His cable-knit socks were folded just under his knees, insured against gravity by a pair of elastic garters. I could see the indent where his garters gripped the top of his calves. I hadn’t seen socks like that in years.

“We want the 99,” I said.

“That’s the express. You just missed it.” The kids groaned. He stepped forward to hail the 107. My bus-stop companion hitched up his shorts, inadvertently advertising the contours of his cobblers as he plumbed his pockets for change. He withdrew a handful of coins and the contents of his shorts sank back into obscurity.

He climbed aboard bus 107. In its wake, another green blur appeared up the hill. “Here comes the 99!” I shouted. The kids capered on the footpath as the driver swung the bus in, doors parting with a hiss. Leaping aboard, my charges tore up the aisle, scrambling onto the high bench seats up the back.

“Three under-seven’s and me to Freo please.”

“$2.90” said the driver, an arithmetical prodigy.

He gazed into his side mirror as I hurriedly counted out a palmful of 10 and 20-cent pieces, plonking them down in two small stacks. He raked the coins into his till and pulled out sharply into the heavy traffic leaving me to stumble up the aisle.

Propped against the rear window, we four had an elevated view of our fellow passengers. Half a dozen students, heads bowed over their smart phones, would not have noticed if a gorilla boarded. A white-haired woman in a blue sunhat was nursing a shopping cart on the seat next to her. In front of us, three biker-types with black straggly hair were squabbling about where to get off. “I tell you, jackass!” one remarked. “It’s only a five minute walk from Adelaide Street to the pub.”

My seven-year-old jumped to his feet. “You’re next!” he shouted at the bikers.

I grabbed him by the arm. “For goodness sake sit down! What are you doing?!”

He pointed at the biker sitting alone directly behind his two mates. The bloke was leaning forward, gripping the seat in front. I could vaguely see that his knuckles were inked with blue capitals.

“See Mum! That hand spells Y-O-U-R and that one says N-E-X-T!”

The guy with the scary knuckles swivelled to take us in, then held up both his hands. “Read that can ya mate?” he said to my boy, flashing the gaps in his teeth. “Done some good work, they ‘ave,” and he balled his fingers into fists and mimed a couple of uppercuts.

My son turned to me with eyes like saucers. I patted his thigh: “Not so loud, hey?” Suddenly, the driver jumped on the brakes and my neighbour’s 4-year-old shot off the back seat, landing clumsily in the aisle. l scrambled down just as a technicoloured arm scooped him up and set him back on his feet. “There you go little fella,” said tattoo-man (who’d clearly blown a few pay cheques on his body art). “Evil Knievel’s driving the bus today.”

“Are you okay, Finny?” I said, lifting small boy onto my lap and wrapping my arms around him. The bus surged forward.

Our bus cruised along the highway, the late sun hanging low over Leighton beach. I looked around for a window latch to let in some fresh air but the glass was slick. When did they take the latches off bus windows, I wondered. Over the old rail bridge we went, depositing the old woman and her shopping cart on the other side.

Up the back, pitching and swaying across the traffic lanes was making me queasy but the kids were squealing their appreciation. Up ahead, I saw the Queen Street roundabout. “Almost there, Finny” I said, wedging my knee against the seat in front as we swung clockwise. The kids slid sideways, banging shoulders and giggling. The bus pulled into the bay and the doors sprang open. I gathered up our belongings and ushered three small bodies towards the exit.

“I got kids too, said Mr Knuckles. “At least, I use-ter.”

“Well, you can’t have mine,” I said, friendly-fashion.

Enough about me

Enough about me
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday May 11, 2013

A conversation is not just a rudimentary exchange of information or a conduit for drinking with friends. It has winners and losers. It can be life changing. I know this because a conversation in a pub landed me my husband.

Back then, I didn’t know fate had arranged for me to be leaning against the back bar of the Subi hotel with a man wearing Ronnie Barker glasses. He was comfortably stout, like a prized footballer gone to pot, and I noticed his manly hands (I have a thing about extremities). He was charming, disarming and attentive but it was the way he spoke to me that made me skittish, like Bambi. Here was a man who was warming up for a conversational joust. I set out to beguile him with my verbal prowess.

I failed to allow for the first glass of champagne on my empty stomach. It sent my mouth galloping ahead of my brain. Halfway through the second glass, I was babbling and gushing. Sentences I should have filtered for tedium and stupidity dropped straight onto my tongue and became clumsy word spillage. I was all single-entendre, my brilliant wit sabotaged by a bad case of love jitters.

On this night, I thought it best to attempt being a coquette, rather than try to outfox this razor-sharp raconteur when I’d gone all goosy. And anyway, he was asking too many Mensa questions: “So, being an only child, what have you learnt about other people?”

How to respond? I squirmed. He leaned back and propped his elbows on the bar while a lively silence throbbed between us. My brain darted about in search of a penetrating reply but all I could come up with was: “the big question for me is why none of my yoga pants have ever been to yoga?”

He grinned – I took it as a compliment. And then he leaned in close, brushed an eye-lash off my cheek and whispered “Make a wish.” I giggled in falsetto.

I secretly asked the champagne fairy for three wishes – I wished this man would take me home and hang his bad tie in my closet, I wished to grow old and grey with him and I wished for thinner arms. The good fairy granted two wishes, and I’m resigned to wearing sleeves.

That is the G-rated version of the night I met my man on a late summer’s night. Our eighth anniversary has just passed (un-remarked), but he remains a challenging conversationalist.

Conversation is an art form. We all admire those who have mastered the serve and volley of lingual ping-pong.   

But some acquaintances suck the oxygen out of the air by talking incessantly. Self-obsession asphyxiates friendships. If I’m button-holed by a bloke who doesn’t draw breath for two minutes, I hightail it to the dessert buffet.

Interrupters also infuriate: my children have perfected the technique. But it’s adult interjectors who should be gagged – those people who leap in and ruin my punchlines, or smother me with their preoccupations. I murmur to myself: “Sorry I was talking while you were interrupting.”

Why can’t bores recognise themselves? Some even refer to themselves in the third person, just so we can appreciate them from yet another angle: “And then the nice girl in Country Road said to me – Barbara Blackwood – you look amazing in that colour. Barbara, that dress goes so well with your tattoo. Barbara, we should name that dress after you – we’ll call it…. The Barbara!”

I, too, used to think my stories were riveting. At 20, I landed my first job in commercial radio: a chick among peacocks. I answered the phones with try-hard sophistication: “96FM , we will rock you!” Teetering in my white stilettos I would carry cups of International Roast to celebrity disc jockeys with velvet tonsils. On Friday nights I would regale my friends: “And then he asked me to be the barrel-girl! Me! He told me to giggle and rustle the entry forms so they made crunchy paper noises, it was sooo cool…”

Before long I caught two girlfriends rolling their eyes at each other across the table. My ego collapsed. These days I tell my stories while keeping my third eye roving for audience boredom.  

Some people like to take over a conversation – they interject about their famous second cousin the soapie extra, or launch into the intricacies of their colonoscopy (scraping the bowels of social convention). Some people feel compelled to convince me that daddy long legs are poisonous but their mouths aren’t big enough to bite people, and if I disagree, they become strident.

At my home in Utopia, my conversational skills are sagging. My 12-year-old cancels me out with his noise-cancelling headphones. Husband is riveted by The Footy Show and can’t be distracted so my three-year-old and I compete for each other’s attention.

Sometimes, when I want to ask my beloved about the state of our relationship, I’ll sidle up to him and say: “Honey, do you remember that night we met in that pub?” And he’ll smile and say: “Yes, blossom, that’s the night you thought talking about yourself constituted a conversation.”