My father recently purchased an Apple iPad. To the best of my knowledge, this means he can now reverse his vasectomy and obtain up to the minute information about the weather in Turkmenistan from the comfort of his vibrating armchair. If the overwhelming sycophancy being liberally spooned over this gadget is to be believed, then it seems likely that those who opt not to buy one will be survival-challenged or worse within a matter of months. However, I for one am willing to take that chance…
At present in Hong Kong it is the mid-Autumn festival. Essentially, this is an opportunity for Hong Kong people to eat somewhat unpalatable ‘Moon Cakes’ and suffer the horrors of an additional day of rest. Swarms of children roam the streets confused by this notion of a day off and struggling to come to terms with life out of uniform. Middle managers, like rampaging Scottish jaikies, conduct hastily convened meetings and rant at abandoned items of office furniture to satiate their chills at not being able to middle manage for the day…
For me, it is extremely important every once in a while to just switch off the mobile, shut down Facebook (imagine that…), abandon the emails and kick back in solitude and contemplation. And yet I still find myself in my sub-technological wilderness wondering whether anyone has updated their status on Facebook or pondering how many emails I have received offering to make my penis more presentable and penetrating to the opposite sex…
It simply seems to be the case that most of us find it incredibly difficult to accept either (a) our ability to be good company for ourselves or (b) the notion that life will go on even if we don’t get a Twitter notification from Karl from Neighbours lamenting to presence of a pube in his soup…
Possibly the greatest ally to this point is the existence and continued popularity of the Bluetooth earpiece. I find these things horrific! Last Chinese New Year, I encountered a father in a theme park bouncing his child along on his shoulders whilst conducting a minor-league business meeting. I found myself thinking: ‘Cant that wait?’…
But Bluetooth adds to this illusion that we must all be immediately available at all times to anyone who wishes to contact us. I heard a woman on the MTR berating someone for not answering her calls ‘yesterday’ and asking the person ‘where you be a?’ It turns out yesterday was a Sunday and thus both she and the caller were observing a day off and so the call could… nay should… have waited…
I knew a guy from Montrose who had a Bluetooth headset but was also famously antisocial. Factoring in the cost of the headset, the rental fees and the funeral costs, all he got for his £4500 investment was a haunting awareness that nobody wanted to be around him and a brain tumour the size of a Chechnyan landmine. But no matter how hard we tried to put it to him, he remained reticent to decry the Bluetooth headset as a redundant indulgence…
This brings me back to the iPad. My knowledge on the subject remains as hazy as my opening gambit might imply, but I believe the user subscribes to information in the form of ‘apps’. Now this to me sounds like an abridged term used by self-indulgent tossers to refer to some trendy holiday island as in ‘Yeah, me Mousey and Davie T. totally kicked the fuck of two arsehole bandits when we were in Apps last year. It was banging!’. But these ‘apps’ can be as curious as a ‘Magic Pen’ app where you can write the word ‘FUCK’ in Belgian on your iPad and only Sir Ian McKellen will be able to see it. Or there is one where Jeremy Clarkson will call out bingo numbers in inappropriately racist accents. Who couldn’t live without that?!
I for one will be sticking to my $289HKD mobile phone with no internet and a scratch in the shape of a wee boner on the top left of the screen. I don’t mean to sound self-congratulatory because I’m sure that I am missing out as a result of not being privy to the latest information at the touch of a button (or swerve of a swirling digit across a silken screen). However, when the bulk of that information is as erroneous as having Charlotte Church tweet that she ‘sicked all down herself lasr night’ I have to question whether I don’t deserve a little pat on the back…
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