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).