Technological diarrhoea

The world is at our fingertips, technologically speaking. It's technological diarrhoea. It runs and it's everywhere. There are now millions of rooms in the world occupied by electronics. On the bus, a person is either listening to their mp3 player, browsing the internet on some new phone that predicts the future or is looking at electronics shops pass them by as they head towards a gadget store (with The Metro newspaper and a handbag on the seat next to them, occupying an entire seat on the bus so you can’t sit down. What bullshit. You loaned some money from a bank for a seat on the extravagantly-priced bus; that handbag and crap should be moved so you can sit down. I hate it when people leave their bags on the seat next to them. Did they pay another ticket price for their bag? No! So move it out of the way or I will sit down on the bag and who knows what sort of relationship will be explored between the contents of your bag and my backside... maybe this is something for another post).

We have so much now. I am the proud owner of an iPhone as well as a laptop and yet, when my laptop takes five minutes from pressing the power button to a fully funtioning operating system, I go insane. I enter this incredible fit of rage where I start shaking and like some sort of fucked-up clairvoyant, I can see myself breaking my laptop in half like something out of a Record Breaker’s feat; where people would be applauding me and I would look on, smiling and waving, throwing bits of laptop into the crowd for people to fight over as I strut off stage with the unmistakeable swagger of someone tearing up a computer. Do I not realise the miracle occurring? Silicon, metal, wires, electric and some other unidentifiable stuff is allowing me to find out what’s happening everywhere in the world and I can’t wait five minutes before having psychotic visions of a broken computer. With this foldaway bit of tech, I can find out if a bunch of gormless gorillas are prancing around in an open field anytime soon or when the next Rolling Stones concert at Hyde Park will be (same thing).

‘My BlackBerry is shit’ is a perfectly valid statement and when the soundwaves of those inevitable words bounce off the walls inside my ear canal, I nod in gleeful agreement, with an expression reading ‘You should have got an iPhone, but you tried to be different in the hope of looking cool and you ended up with a phone that looks like someone pounded an old phone into a metallic waffle’. A difficult expression to read, I’m sure you’ll agree. But you are now capable of speaking to someone through airwaves and hear them clearly. Before mobile technology, if you dialled from the landline and said ‘Meet me in the town centre in half an hour’ and you went at that time; if they didn’t show up, you just had to go home. Out of breath, you’d ring that person back and say ‘why didn’t you meet me in the town centre?’ ‘Oh I got sidetracked, I tried ringing you back but you’d left at that point’. An entire day wasted. Nowadays, you can ask people 'what the hell is going on?' through a bit of metal. And that bit where people say ‘Ok, I’ll send him a message. Argh, I can’t get any reception. Why? Why can’t I get reception? Come on, come on, come on. There we go. Bloody hell, that took the piss.’ What did? The whole five seconds you had to wait before you could beam an entire piece of text to someone in another place? What would you have been doing instead? Saving someone’s life from a burning building? What else would you have done that has angered you so much in that small space of time? I’m sure you understand what I’m getting at now, so next time you use a bit of technology, be a little patient. It’s unbelievable.

‘WHY ISN’T MY PHONE CONNECTING TO THIS WIFI?! THIS NORTH POLE IS SHIT!’ is the next line I’m waiting to hear (when I'm in the North Pole next).

If I was to choose a format, I would put English in technicolour over black and white. ‘Cos then, like, it’s nicer.

I am just one of many that take great joy in being able to have a respectable command of the English language (I know, how arrogant). Decades and centuries have passed with evocative poetry, eloquent writers and articulate speakers, all with the aim of being able to describe a situation so completely true that the reader is immediately able to make an instant connection without the faintest flicker of ennui; a student immersed and convinced that each following word unlocks the mystery of the sentence and eventually, the entire magnum opus. So, if that’s what you were looking for, you’ll be a bit disappointed. I don’t do all that ‘meaning of life’ stuff, I'll leave that to some cheesy poet who just wants to sound profound. Rather, this piece intends to pick apart the things that stealthily frequent our lives. And no, it’s not the toilet paper that inexplicably finds its way onto the spool hanging in my bathroom. Someone from my family does it. I solved that a few weeks ago. Ha! And they say Columbo was a good detective. Twat.

I’m going to keep this post short (not entirely true). I have a healthy obsession with trying to incorporate new words into my lexicon, without those words sounding particularly alien when they exit my mouth in an orderly fashion. See, I think that as a nation, we have a strong tendency to stick with the familiar, which I suppose is only natural considering our habitual instincts. In a country nestling comfortably in a schedule of work, 9 to 5’s, food diaries, gym routines, sock drawers, correct alignment of coasters on the dining table, carrying your phone in a particular pocket, sleepy time, meeting friends, Sky planners and the regular intake of breath mints, it’s no wonder our lives are plagued by repetition. Inevitably, ‘routine’ is bound to spread its languid wings to also encompass our diction and ‘keep it simple’. Consequently, it results in staccato pronunciation of seemingly difficult words that could have comfortably exited our mouths had our tongues been able to form some sort of muscle memory in the early stages of our lives.

I’ll structure a scenario with words for you. Imagine the following sentence being uttered from a toothless urchin on a street corner: ‘Oh, I don’t know how to describe it. It’s... it’s...’ . And the sentence ends on this predictable cliffhanger (how prejudiced; maybe this toothless urchin is actually some sort of linguistic professor... but in this case he's really not. He's a stupid toothless urchin. Deal with it). Can you guess what this person was trying to explain? Yep, it was someone trying to illustrate what heroin is. My conclusion is that these substances aren’t as popular because druggies find them difficult to describe. Their PR is all over the place; they don’t know whether they’re coming or going (probably because that person is on heroin). For example, I love a Starbucks every now and then but that’s largely down to the foamy green and white advertising. And they tell me that the beans help some people in another country so by buying this stuff, I’m actually helping someone by sending my brain into a caffeine-induced frenzy, and who doesn’t want that? So if the rotting, walking, illegal-substance-selling junkies put on a suit, brushed their teeth and either spoke beautifully or sang ‘Golden Brown’ when selling, I might just say ‘Oh, tell me more; the grubby spoon and needle looks interesting. Do they come in other quantities? Or is it just a teaspoon? No thank you, I might come back later ‘cos I wanna see if anyone has a tablespoon or something, ‘cos usually if you buy in larger quantities then stores sell products cheaper due to the whole bulk-buying system which has probably revolutionised shopping as a whole. You know, like a Costco for smack’. Not that I'm condoning this sort of alleyway business, it's just mere observation.

However, I think this rant will remain pointless as I don’t believe that a complete command of English will ever seem cool. Unless I tell you that it is incredibly sexy. ‘Cos erm... it is.