Mind your Busyness

Mind your Busyness
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday July 25, 2015

I stood at the toy shop counter and waited.

If the stripling in charge sensed my presence, he didn’t acknowledge it. He was engrossed in his phone, thumbs strumming the screen. A pair of tiny headphones gummed his ears.

My outside wore an expression of polite resignation. On the inside, I was chafing with annoyance.

Finally, he glanced up. “Sorry,” he said. “Was updating our Facebook page.”

“Just the Lego please,” I replied. He bagged the box, swivelled the credit card machine towards me and calmly returned to swiping his phone.

“Thanks,” I said, trying to catch his downcast eye. But he was too busy multitasking to cope with another distraction.

I remember the days when multitasking meant eating breakfast while thinking about lunch. Or frying bacon and testing the smoke alarms at the same time. I grew up being told to tackle one job at a time. Those who scurried inefficiently from task to task were labelled as scatty or dappy, or a pain. Being able to give your steady and unwavering attention to one mission was a mark of superior intellect.

Back then, if the phone rang, I sat down to answer it. Everyone did. In the 80s, our home telephone ruled from its own settee. A friendship could free range only the length of its green twisty cord. While gossiping, I’d multitask by winding the phone cable around my fingertip until it throbbed and turned purple.

Now I feel sorry for my home phone, trapped by its own limitations. It was just a primitive tool for talking.

I’d old enough to recall when mobile phones came with long rubber antennaes and squishy buttons. I was a cadet reporter in a radio newsroom the day our first Motorola captivated the office. It may as well have been the Roswell alien. The entire staff crowded around it. We young ones jostled to get our first glimpse of this strange creature. It had a pale fleshy keypad, a tightly coiled, muscular cord and a metallic black body. The handset clung to a battery the size of a brick, only heavier. We cubs viewed that mobile phone with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. After ten hours of charging it gave us twenty minutes of talk time. I got a sore shoulder from lugging it around.

Worse, it made us contactable in the field.

“Where the blazes have you got to?” my news director, Murray, would shout down the Motorola. He’d pause long enough to drag deeply on his cigarette.

“It doesn’t take thirty-five minutes to get from the Supreme Court to Wellington Street, young lady!”

It did when we court reporters had nicked off for coffee. In 1989, the closest I came to multitasking was juggling the Motorola and Murray’s temper.

Now, no device can compete with the thrilling gadgetry of my shiny new iPhone. My brain scrambles to attend to its constant demands. Like Pavlov’s dog, I leap to answer the Ding! of every incoming email, the distracting trill announcing another text message. My typing stalls repeatedly as I remind myself to renew my driver’s licence, pay the overdue gas bill and put on a second load of washing. I am at my least efficient when multitasking.

After an hour of interruptions, I resolve to become single-minded. I ignore the unmade beds and the damp washing. I chain my phone to its charger and gag it with the mute function.

“Can’t do two things at once, hey Mum?” says eldest son, smirking. This from a boy who can’t concentrate on homework unless he’s funnelling tasteless music into his ears. I watch him at his laptop, headphones attached. He’s skipping from his essay on Genghis Khan to a music video while vetting every beep and flash of his phone. Never has any brain been asked to perform so many tasks for so little mental output.

My Mum can’t understand why we’re allowing our gadgets to shorten our attention spans.

I went with her to the phone shop to replace her ailing ten-year-old mobile.

“I just want something basic,” she told the shop assistant.

He steered us towards a wall of electronics.

“This one is popular with our older customers,” he said, pointing at the latest iPhone. “It has bigger buttons, larger fonts, assisted GPS, a great camera. You can even edit your videos.

“I just want a phone that phones,” she reiterated.

“Like this one?” I said helpfully, pointing at the most basic model I could see.

“That one does nothing except dial and text,” said the salesman with a shrug. “It’s a pet rock.”

“I had a pet rock once. I miss it,” I said defensively.

Overwhelmed by choice, we left the shop empty-handed and went to have coffee and cake instead. Call me callow, but that’s the kind of multitasking I’m good at.

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.  

Robo-Shop of Horrors

Robo-Shop of Horrors
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday March 8, 2014

I am being bullied by a machine who delights in being a shrew. We were wary of each other at first, that self-serve checkout and I. I tried not to think of her as a dictatorial tin can. I scolded myself for feeling intimidated by her sophisticated touch-screen interface and her beeping castigations. After all, she was one of a dozen talking robots designed to speed me through my  supermarket. We should have been friends. But it was clear from the start she had no interest in our relationship.

Maybe her automated woman’s intuition sensed my electronic incompetence. Perhaps she enjoyed lauding her artificial intelligence over my evolutionary one. Every time we met, she stared at me with her omnipotent eye, awaiting my first move.

I was moving all right – with both hands I was cartwheeling and somersaulting my Shortbread Creams in desperate pursuit of a bar code. Just as I finally located it on the inside of the underside flap, she announced loudly in a patronising tone: “Please scan your first item.” Her voice had the kind of velvety smugness my husband finds attractive. I felt a hot rush of jealousy. How dare she speak to me this way – me, the customer she was built to serve! I was on war footing with the talking robot at Coles.

I slapped my bananas onto her scale. “Key in item’s code or look up item” she demanded. I dutifully selected bananas while muttering about her lack of prepositions.

“How many?” she wanted to know.

“Can’t you see, cyclops?” I gloated. She was silent. I rolled my eyes and tapped in the number six.

 “Place item in bagging area.” I obediently dropped the bananas into the bag. She paused. “Unidentified item in bagging area” she said. I lifted up the bananas and let them fall in again.  “Item is not in bagging area.”

“Yes it is!” I shouted. “They’re right there! In the bag! Are you stupid?”

And then above her annoyingly square head she flicks her green beacon to an angry red.

I am trapped between this ogress and my overflowing trolley. I swivel my head  trying to catch the attention of a human in uniform. I see the shoppers behind me shift impatiently from one foot to the other. A young mother tears open a packet of Maltesers to pacify her whingeing toddler but the bag splits and the contents shower the floor.

I hail the blue-haired checkout boy from aisle six who raises his index finger to indicate he’s on his way. He plonks a plastic triangle on his conveyor belt that reads: ‘Let us serve you at another location.’ His next-in-line customer sends me eye-daggers.

Teenage employee arrives at my stalled machine and huffs: “The self-service attendant just ducked off to the loo. Bloody machines can’t fix anything by themselves!” He swipes the screen with a plastic card and my electronic she-devil springs to life.

“Please scan your next item,” she says to me sweetly, but I know she’s just flirting with the checkout boy, because he pats her stainless steel rump and trudges back to his cash register.

I am now embarrassed by the holdup. I resume scanning the contents of my trolley knowing a dozen pairs of impatient eyes are boring into my back.

“Remove unidentified object from bagging area” the she-robot barks.

“No,” I whisper urgently. “That’s the complimentary packet of pegs attached to this new washing powder.”

But she’s not buying my story and gleefully jams on her red light. I turn a shade of tomato myself. This can’t be happening! I lift out the washing powder and thrust the peg packet roughly up against her inky screen. “See!” I hiss. “They’re stapled on. The pegs come with it. It’s a sales gimmick!” And in a fit of pique I give her a secret kick with my left sneaker but she doesn’t flinch under her metal skirt. 

The self service attendant, fresh from his toilet stop, marches over: “I saw that,” he chides me. I gaze across at the manned checkouts and realise every customer I began with has finished and gone. I look to my right; my neighbour is also looking aggrieved. His machine’s red light is now blinking a slow waltz with mine. “Having fun yet?” I say.

“I just want this damn packet of chewing gum!” he says. “It doesn’t weigh enough to register.”  

“I’ve had it up to pussy’s bow with my machine, too. She’s been giving me a hiding.”

He nods sympathetically and points to his fem-bot who is chanting: ‘Select from popular items or look up item alphabetically.’

“With that kind of attitude,” he says, “no wonder she’s still on the shelf.”

The end of the line

The end of the line
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday October 5, 2013

My home telephone is almost obsolete. It hardly rings any more. Sometimes I forget it’s even there. It languishes by the window on my desk, a wallflower obscured by the showy blooms of a potted cyclamen.

I know my home phone is lonely because as I walk past, it emits a weedy ‘peep.’ I see its will to live ebbing away, unable to compete with the thrilling gadgetry of my shiny iphone. I feel sorry for my home phone – trapped by its own limitations – good for talking, and not much else.

When I was a child, the telephone ruled from its own settee. Ours was Bakelite and sat like a black brick on a small lacquered table by the front door, attached to a bench seat upholstered in flocked green velvet. This is where we sat to answer the phone. The handset was a dumbbell, only heavier. Holding it to my ear for more than three minutes made my neck ache. Next to the phone lay a glossy white teledex that sprang open to reveal the numbers of everyone we knew.

Everything stopped when the phone rang. It had to: the cable to the mouthpiece was only two-feet long. My nanna would settle herself on the bench seat, wait politely for another three rings to pass, then pick up the handset: “Good afternoon,” she’d say, lips pursed to round her vowels, “Mrs Thornton speaking.” She knew rushing down the hallway made one breathless. (And being too eager was crass).

Calling someone on the Bakelite phone, however, took a 7-year-old’s concentration.  Dialling the number 1 was a short stop, so my finger only had to rotate the wheel an inch. But dialling the number 9 took effort, a full 240 degree trip. I can still hear the ticka-ticka-ticka as the wheel, reaching the end of the spring, lurched backwards, eager to discolate my index finger. Mum dialled numbers with the pointy lid of her Bic Cristal pen, the height of secretarial sophistication.

In my teens, the home phone was the centre of my universe. Ours was squat and custard coloured with a panel of ten push-buttons on the front. It had a springy cord which I could stretch from the side table, around the corner and under the pantry door. There I’d sit, out of earshot, between the dog biscuits and the bread bin, phone clamped to my ear, knees hugging my chest. I got leg cramps, but it was worth it. After forty-five minutes on the blower, it was decided – I’d wear my nylon parachute pants on Saturday night.

Sundays were for post-mortems on the electrifying events of the night before:

 “Didja see the way he was lookin’ at you?”

“As if! Was he really lookin’ at me?”

“He was lookin’ at you, all right!”

“Stoked! Was he lookin’ over his shoulder, or right at me?”

“Over his shoulder AND right at you!”

 “Get off that phone!”

“Gotta go, Mum’s doin’ her block!”

I’d emerge from the dim-lit pantry, blinking in the daylight.

Back then, I knew all my friends’ numbers by heart. Even now, twenty years since my besties moved out of home, I can still rattle off their childhood home numbers, along with my teenage phone patter: “Hi Mrs Simpson, how are you? Off to the tennis club today? Great! Is Jane there please?

I cursed holidays that separated me from my home phone.  One summer at Rottnest, with heartthrob Andy stranded on the mainland, I spent all my pocket money at the Bathurst settlement pay-phone. It was always occupied. Some bloke with a Swan Gold would be flicking through a tattered White Pages while he leaned against the glass talking cricket with a mate. I’d wait impatiently as my 3 o’clock telephonic rendezvous with Andy drew near. Finally, Swan Gold man would shamble off and I’d dive in, ramming coins into the slot, hoping Andy would pick up, not his Dad.

 “Hi Andy! It’s me!”

“Hey! Been swimmin’?”

“Yeah. At the Basin.”

“Hot here too. Cricket’s on.”

“Oh.”

“3 o’clock tomorrow then?”

“Okay”

“Okay. See ya.”

Now, phone booths are all but extinct. I don’t miss them. But watching an old episode of Dr Who, my 6-year-old son piped up as Tom Baker and his trailing scarf vanished into the Tardis: “What’s that blue box?”

“That’s a phone booth.”

I decided the next time we take the kids to Rottnest, I’m going to make a pilgrimage to the Bathurst phone box, that monument to 20th century phone technology.  (It’s still there, outside Unit 501.) I’ll tell the kids about the time I worked up the nerve to ring a boy I liked, only to slam the phone down in panic as he answered.

And that’s the thing with mobiles: they’re too delicate. Smart but fragile. I need a phone that can handle my temper when those blasted telemarketers call during dinner. Only the home phone appreciates a good hang up.

Fast Track to Nowhere

Fast Track to Nowhere
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday July 13, 2013

Train travel is the ultimate vehicle for people-watching. It’s the perfect antidote to the four-walled claustrophobia of housewifery. I like to feel part of the throng to-ing and fro-ing, strangers heading briefly in the same direction.

On my way to the station, I cast my eye over the dozen commuters up ahead on the platform. Everyone does their waiting in their own way. No-one looks agitated or out of breath, so I conclude we haven’t just missed the train.

My three-year-old daughter scrambles out of her stroller to empty her ten cent coin collection into the ticket machine. A dishevelled young bloke with wild hair and no shoes shuffles past us. He settles himself down in a patch of sunlight strobed by the wooden bench and closes his eyes. For a moment, my toddler stops feeding the machine while she studies his face.

“Hit the jackpot yet?” An elderly gent in a tweed jacket has strolled up behind us. As the last of the ten cent pieces clunk down the slot, small daughter fishes for the ticket as it drops into the tray. “I winned!” she yells, waving her prize in the air.

We crane our necks to see who’ll be first to spot our train snaking round the bend. We hear the hiss of metal brakes and soon after four carriages rumble into the station.

I always turn left once inside the doors, just to imagine the thrill of first class travel. Three-year-old, kneeling on her seat, presses her face against the window. I settle in for the ride to town, trying to guess where my travelling companions are going and why.

Next to me is a nerdy-looking bloke wearing Woody Allen glasses. He holds his smartphone in his lap and texts: “Be there soon, darling” I feel guilty reading over his shoulder, but I can’t help myself. I wonder if he’s texting a lover, a girlfriend or his wife. I settle on ‘girlfriend’ and picture her as Annie Hall in wide-legged woollen pants and fedora hat.

Opposite us are two middle-aged women talking in sign language. I am mesmerised. In between bouts of furious hand movements they throw back their heads and laugh raucously. Their merriment is the only human sound in our carriage.

Everyone else has their head bowed, fixated by the gadgets in their laps. There’s not a book or newspaper in sight. No-one is talking, or taking in the view. There is only quiet concentration as thumbs sweep over keypads. Technology is hard at work here.  

I’m struck by the notion of eye contact, and what has happened to it. There’s certainly none in this carriage. Even the three teenagers huddled by the door are isolates bent over their devices. They are strangely expressionless, oblivious to their surroundings. A businessman standing near them stumbles and grabs for the handhold as the train brakes start to grip – but not one of the teenagers look up. Twice he has to say “excuse me” before they begrudgingly move aside to let him off. 

Perhaps the virtual world makes reality dull by comparison.  But I remember the bus ride home from high school as the highlight of my school days. The novelty of having boys on board sent our girly chatter into hyper-drive. One sly smile from a cute boy would provide endless entertainment. We would duck behind our seats giggling, then dissect his body language so intently we thought we could read his mind before he even spoke it. (“Can you reach the bell for me?” became as exciting as a first kiss.)

Yesterday, at my favourite corner cafe, I was puzzled by two young women having coffee at a nearby table. They looked to me like old pals, but for several minutes, they sat in silence, absentmindedly punching their thoughts into their phones. Perhaps connecting on Facebook is more fun than connecting across the table, I thought. But it was an odd sight. What’s driving this obsession? Fear of missing out? On what? The rapid-fire rush of social networking.

At dinner I tell my eldest son about my train ride. I recount for him what it was like before smartphones and iPods. How I would catch buses and trains and have no choice but to kill time watching the passing parade of commuters or the slideshow of suburbs flitting by. I tell him I quite enjoyed the downtime after the frenetic pace of the newsroom. 

I wonder out loud whether we’re all the more productive for having the internet as our constant and available companion. Whether this ever-present connectedness is making us super- efficient. And are we happier for it? My son pipes up: “Maybe those people on the train were just plain bored, Mum.”

That got me thinking. Dead time is now considered a waste of time. Portable technology fills the quiet gaps in living and keeps us permanently switched on and plugged in. Perhaps that’s why I love forgoing the car for the train: someone else to do the driving. Twenty minutes of mental holiday. That’s what I crave.

The Next Best Thing

The Next Best Thing
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday June 1, 2013

Here’s my conspiracy theory: today’s gadgets are made to fail. And here’s my evidence: both the vacuum cleaner and my mobile phone have carked it just weeks out of warranty.

Last Sunday, the vacuum cleaner, my trusty servant, stopped dead. The two of us were having a lovely time sucking up all the bits of Lego left lying on the loungeroom floor. (We often play games, the vacuum cleaner and I, ferreting about under the sofa with the suction at warp speed. We try to guess from the rattle – rattle – clunk! what mystery object has shot up the hose.)

Always noisy and frolicsome, my appliance was suddenly still. All I could hear was a faint ticking. I rolled its body into the recovery position, ripped open the lid and shook the bag resting limply inside. I smacked the machine shut hoping to restore its noisy breath. Nothing. I squinted up the hose to see if its airway was blocked but I had an interrupted view of the front door. I emptied the dust filter and pumped the on/off switch with a firm but steady rhythm but by now its body was cold.

I had just enough time to race to the electrical shop before it closed. I burst through the door, my expensive Italian clutched in my arms, dribbling fine grey dust from its back end. The bloke behind the counter took one look and said: “We’ll have a crack, luv, but now that it’s out of warranty, the drop-off fee is $85 and we charge $65 an hour labour which doesn’t cover parts so it might be cheaper to buy a new one.”

I got the feeling he knew something I didn’t: my two-year-old vacuum cleaner was built notto last. It had what Choice Magazine calls “planned obsolescence.” I felt like a chump. Here I was thinking my vacuum and I had a future together, and it was secretly planning career suicide. I forgave the betrayal and begged the electrician: “I need to know what went wrong, if you can’t fix it, I want an autopsy.”

The very next day, my mobile phone crashed in sympathy. An inky blank screen stared back at me. Somewhere inside it were the phone numbers of everyone I know. I went to the Apple store, a place so technologically advanced the geeky staff look uber-cool in their coke-bottle glasses and identical blue polo shirts. Customers, depending on their age, look either confused or euphoric at the smorgasbord of technology laid out before them. At the door, the maitre d’Apple fiddled around with my phone for a minute then suggested: “Time for an upgrade?” I tried to look euphoric but he sensed my confusion.

“Did you back it up ma’am?” He already knew the answer so I replied guiltily: “Please tell me you can restore it? My social life lives inside that  phone.”

 “Well, if it can be fixed, it’ll take a couple of weeks. But your screen is cracked  and iPhone 4s are pretty outdated now….”

“Okay, okay” I interrupt, “I get your drift.”

Mobile phones aren’t meant to be repaired, they’re meant to be upgraded. Superseded by something a little thinner or a little longer so that the charger and the three covers you have at home no longer fit.

I can’t get used to the idea that TVs and computers and cameras that are working just fine should be replaced simply because a newer version comes along. It makes me feel gluttonous.

My mother had her Hecla toaster for nearly 30 years. It had doors that flipped down and it never complained no matter how thick the toast we stuffed in it. In Mum’s day, broken things were fixed by a generation of menders and make-doers with tweezers and soldering irons. My eldest, 12, is a whizz at building contraptions, but already, he loves to trade up his gear. How many pairs of headphones are enough? Will Playstation 3 be embarrassing once Playstation 4 arrives?  

There was nothing terribly wrong with my vacuum cleaner, as it happens, it just had a worn belt. The repair cost me $160 but we are reunited. Now  I know my two-year-old Italian is past its prime. 

My new phone, however, has been greeted with much excitement by the small members of the house. It’d be even more exciting if I knew the phone number of someone to call, but for now, the phone and I are just a lonely little twosome with lots of fancy icons. My iPhone 5 is so advanced it has a genie inside it called “Siri” who listens, comments and does whatever I say. “Call Chelsea Pizza” I demand, and she finds the number and dials it. “Siri, are you my friend”, I ask her, as the kids guffaw.

“I am not just your friend” she replies in her husky robotic voice, “I am your new “B-F-F.” The kids are now hysterical. I quietly explain to Siri that the vacuum cleaner and I were once “Best Friends Forever”, but we fell out over some Lego.

Writing on the wall

Writing on the wall
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday April 6, 2013

Memory has a mind of its own.  At random, it chooses what to keep. My grandmother’s handwriting is writ large in my memory. I remember her ringing me on her black Bakelite phone: “I’ve posted you a surprise, darling.” She knew my little legs would be dashing to the front  gate every five minutes to see if the postie was a speck up the road.  

I could pick out my nan’s penmanship in an instant, even before the perfumed envelope gave it away. Her capitals had graceful loops and flourishes – an artistic hand that also embroidered daisies on dresses for my doll. I watched mesmerised as the same hand whisked eggs into a blur to make dainty sponges.

It was there, in my nan’s kitchen, that she wrote me her shopping lists: long columns of her handwriting showing off her beautiful curlicue C for corned beef – 1 lb. Potatoes with a flouncy P, a firm downstroke for the B in Bovril, an exaggerated T for treacle and Sago – the o with a hook that swept the next word ‘Pudding’ into brackets – so I’d know what Sago was for. Such foreign-sounding things she wanted. I tucked her list into my koala purse and pedalled to the shop. First hurdle: deciphering her script. Second hurdle: matching the groceries to the strange words on the list. Then I’d ride home with bulging string bags hanging from my handlebars, banging on my knees or swinging dangerously into the spokes.

Even now, her writing goes hand-in-hand with how I remember her: graceful and neat. She left behind that permanent imprint of her 90 years on the planet. My nan’s lovely cursive resides on the backs of family photos. It lives inside the letters we keep as treasures under the lid of the piano stool at mum’s house. The seat of our family.

My own handwriting is as erratic as a chicken scratch. I’m so out of practice I can barely jot down half a page without writer’s cramp. I used to write my television stories long-hand on spiral notebooks, a welter of script. I sweated on the fire escape stairs outside the newsroom, scribbling away as deadline approached. Sentences that didn’t sound right when spoken aloud were roughly scrubbed out in favour of rhythmic ones. Sudden brainwaves would force themselves onto the pad, squeezed into margins  – a scrawl legible only to me. It was always a race to see whether inspired thoughts would vaporise before I could get them on paper.

No such trouble now. My laptop and I are intimates. My fingers fly over the keys – brain and hands finally in unison. Typing fast feels masterly. With such mechanical clarity, should I ever bother with pens?

My children won’t remember life before the internet. Their ideas will be pressed onto paper by the clicking of keys rather than the scratching of biros. For them, postcards will be quaint reminders of holidays before Facebook.

In high school French I decided my number 7 needed the European sophistication of a cross bar. I was a maths dunce but with one horizontal stroke, I became numerically glamorous – those 7’s of mine were so continental they could have been smoking Gauloises and eating croissants. Smitten, I have written my 7’s with a bar ever since: seventh heaven!

As classmates, we took great pains to graffiti our fanciest handiwork all over each others’ diaries. We changed our writing styles as often as the hems on our pleated beige dresses. Even now, I can instantly picture the cursive of my closest school friends: all those birthday cards and books gifted with their funny, affectionate inscriptions.

Curious, I don’t know the handwriting of newer friends. We talk and text and email, but don’t pen notes. Will their writing be bold or slap-dash or in beautiful italics? Are they right-handed or mollydooker? I’d like to know.

My husband hides a handwritten note each time he creeps out of the house at dawn for the airport. I wake up in our bed and feel less empty for the small thrill of finding his letter. Usually it’s tucked under my laptop or in the Cornflakes box. Silly I know, but it’s comforting to see the essence of him on paper, a billet-doux tiding me over until his return. I return the favour by planting an even more effusive love letter in his suitcase. (I usually wrap it around nasty household bills, each one annotated with a love heart in the hope he’ll pay them and leave me flush with cash.)

Now I’m mourning a graceful skill that has had its day. Handwriting is an art because expressing ourselves in ink is an exercise in restraint. Even a rude letter starts with ‘Dear…’ before roasting the recipient. How many times have I dashed off an email forgetting my hasty reply might be mistaken for bluntness – I’m always embarrassed at sounding impolite. Perhaps I need to slow down and reacquaint myself with the gentleness of handwriting. If I concentrate, I might even be able to make it legible.