New technology, not everyone is happy
Posted: Mon May 03, 2010 11:49 pm
In the olden days it was easy to make a television work. You plugged an aerial cable into the back, then bashed the top with your fist until, eventually, Hughie Green stopped jumping up and down. Things have changed. Have you tried to make a modern TV work? It cannot be done. No, don’t argue; it can’t. You have to get a man round and then it still won’t work because you have absolutely no idea what to press on the remote-control device.
I am looking now at the plipper thing for the TV in my office. It has 32 buttons on it, including one marked “COMPO/(rgb 8)”. Any idea what that does? I haven’t. I do understand the one marked “Power”, but this does not actually turn the television on. So far as I can tell, nothing does, which is why, for three years, it has been off. Frankly, for getting the news I’d have been better off building a chain of beacons.
Then there is the world of the mobile phone. Sometimes my wife asks me to answer her Raspberry and not once in a year have I been able to do so before the caller rings off. To my way of thinking, it’s not a communication device. It’s a sex toy for geeks. A laptop enthusiast’s Rabbit.
However, my life took a dramatic turn for the worse last week because I took delivery of a new flat in London. It’s been done up by a developer and fitted with every single item from every single gadget magazine in the universe. This means I cannot operate a single thing. Nothing, d’you hear? Nothing at all.
Let us take, for example, the old-fashioned pleasure of making a cup of coffee. For many years this involved putting some water in a kettle and boiling it. But now kettles are seen as messy, which is why my new flat has a multi-buttoned aluminium panel set into the wall. The idea is that you fill it with beans and the boiling water is instant. Sounds great, but the instruction book is 400 pages long and I’m sorry but if I waded through that, my longing for a cup of coffee would be replaced by a fervent need for a quart of armagnac.
The coffee machine, though, is the tip of the iceberg. There’s a music system that can beam any radio station in the world into any room. Last night I selected a classic rock station from San Francisco and was enjoying very much the non-stop stream of Supertramp, until I wanted to go to bed. This meant turning the system off and, for me at least, that is impossible.
Normally, of course, you just hit the offending electronic good with a hammer or throw it on the floor — this works well for alarm clocks in hotel rooms — but I was holding a remote-control device. Smashing that into a million pieces, I realised, would not stop the noise. I needed to find the actual box and I couldn’t. So the only solution was to fly to California ... and burn the radio station down.
I considered it but in the end went to bed to The Logical Song. The irony was not lost on me. This morning the station was playing Dreamer. The irony was lost on me there, though. In a boiling torrent of rage.
It’s not just the music system and the kettle, either. The extractor fan above the hob has seven settings. Why? What’s wrong with off and on? I can’t think of anything that’s less in need of seven settings ... apart from maybe a pacemaker.
Other things? Well, I can’t open the garage door — it’s remote control, obviously — and the entry phone doesn’t appear to be connected to the front door. That means there’s an increased chance it’s connected to air traffic control at Heathrow and, as a result, I daren’t go near it.
Burglar alarm? Nope. Television? Nope. Broadband? Not a chance. And the cooker? Hmm, you could use its controls to remotely pilot a US air force spy drone. But to make a shepherd’s pie? Not in a million years.
And, of course, I can’t contact the man who installed any of this stuff because he’s in Aspen. People who install high-tech equipment are always in bloody Aspen. This is because they’re always American. They go to gadget shows in Las Vegas, get completely carried away and then come to Europe to install systems that no one over here can understand. We’ve only just got over drawbridges, for Christ’s sake. Then they disappear and the people who made the various bits and pieces go bust. Which means you’re left in a house that has everything — and nothing at all.
In a desperate attempt to turn everything off, I thought I’d find the fuse box. Fuse box? To an American gadgeteer, a fuse box is as Victorian as a horse and carriage. So, in my new flat, the fuse box is a fuse room. And it’s not hard to find, because you can hear the circuitry humming from a hundred yards away. Or you could if you weren’t being deafened by Even in the Quietest Moments.
Then you open the door and, holy mother of God, it’s like stepping onto the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. I am not joking. There are rows and rows of switches and thousands of tiny blinking green lights. Thousands? Yes. Thousands.
I have been on the flight deck of a modern Airbus jet liner and I assure you there are fewer switches and lights up there than there are in the bowels of my three-bedroom flat. It’s so scary that you don’t dare touch anything in case, when you come out again, you are in Chicago.
Apparently this is not unusual. Many modern properties have rooms such as this, full of warp cores and modems and circuit breakers. The fans needed to keep it all cool would propel a military hovercraft; the power needed just to power itself would light Leeds; and it’s all for no purpose whatsoever because no one in the real world understands any of it.
As I sat on the floor, then, with no heating, no kettle, no freezer, no music, no television, no broadband, no light and no hope any time soon of turning the situation around, a profound thought wafted into my head. Our endless pursuit of a high-tech future seems to have taken us back to the Stone Age.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/commen ... 113826.ece
