Holding on by the fingertips

A recurring theme of posts to this website can be filed under the heading ‘Moans About New Technology’. These tend to range from complaints about things that don’t work – or don’t work for oldies – to discourses about whether it is just a fact of life that that the modern world inevitably and gradually leaves you behind.

In response to the above, the average human being first struggles with increasing desperation to keep up and then – perhaps in a moment of self-realisation or just wisdom – he recognises that he just don’t care anymore and thereafter ‘relaxes’ into old age, all the while content to live somewhere ‘back in the old days’, i.e. when he was last comfortable with the fashionable technology of the moment.

I’m holding my hand up here and confessing that, although I claimed to have embraced ‘senior citizen’ status about five or six years ago, secretly that wasn’t quite the case.

It’s quite true that, of all the things you can do on a smartphone, I probably utilise no more than 20% of the totality.

It was ever thus with my previous smartphone to the one I use now and, when I switched to my new (current) one – this under pressure from my thirty-something kids – I made a commitment to try and develop my understanding (and therefore usage) of the delights that were available to me but which hirtherto I had balked at trying.

When earlier I said I used about 20% of my smartphone’s capabilities, I may need to qualify that.

I still only use my smartphone for phoning and texting people – oh, and also synchronising the data via Bluetooth between my Garmin fitness wristband and the downloaded Garmin software in my smartphone which then retains it in perpetuity for me to view.

I don’t use my smartphone to go on the internet, communicate with anyone via social media [I don’t even really understand what types are available or what possible use they might ever be to me], or look up the weather, or use Google Maps to get myself around the world. Or indeed anything else you can potentially do via the apps you have provided with the package you obtained when you picked up your smartphone from the shop and/or subsequently bought and downloaded.

Would phoning and texting amount to 20% of a smartphone’s capability … or less? Whichever it is, that’s the proportion I use.

The other thing I wish to report today is that currently I am subject to a bit of a general ‘new technology’ crisis.

Being an oldie, I am extremely suspicious of ‘deliberate in built obsolescence’ in new things.

Take my new Hewlett Packard desktop computer, bought perhaps three years ago. It worked fine at first in every respect and I felt that – having used it to make the move from a laptop back to a desktop – I had made the right decision for me.

And then along came Google Chrome, which overtook the normal way I ‘went onto the internet’ (Internet Explorer). Apparently it was an infinitely more sophisticated, interactive and all-round useful step forward.

However, my reaction to it was rather like my reaction to Microsoft Edge and something called Dropbox, both of which also came with my new desktop computer in-built bundle package.

To me they all just seemed bloody complicated and – from my perspective – completely superfluous. Whatever enhanced capabilities and additional gismos and widgets they offered to the user (me), I didn’t feel I needed them. All I wanted to do was ‘go on the internet’ … and, er … that was it.

Within a relatively short space of time I had disengaged completely from Microsoft Edge and Dropbox and had come to regard Google Chrome as nothing more than a ‘bit more complicated’ version of Internet Explorer.

Until recently, when Google Chrome began playing up.

I’ve now reached the point where – if I allow it to – Google Chrome suddenly ‘freezes’ whichever website page I am currently looking at, so that I can neither scroll up and down it nor ‘go back’ to a previous page, nor indeed choose to move to another one.

My only option is then to ‘restart’ my computer and ‘come back in again … hopefully to return to the website page I was reading at the point it got frozen’.

In the ordinary course of events, I would now estimate, my Google Chrome system ‘freezes’ about once every twenty minutes. It buggers up my task (and certainly any enjoyment I might ever have had) in going on the internet. I don’t have a clue how to remedy this catastrophe. Why don’t things do what they used to do ‘in the old days, i.e. when you bought a typewriter, or a toaster? They just did what ‘they said on the tin’ – no more, no less … and that was that.

Why does my Google Chrome software now ‘fall out’ every twenty minutes or so? Is it built-in obsolescence, designed to get me to fork out for a new computer? Answers, please, to this address – by postcard preferably, rather than by email (because Chrome might ‘freeze’ my email account).

Next, broadband wi-fi systems.

My home broadband (wi-fi) system is also playing up. As a customer I pay a fortune to my service provider company  every month for my broadband service (only about eighteen months ago I was promised 50% faster speed or something in return for paying £10 more per month, which seemed a good deal).

Now – about ten times per day – I suddenly get a notification on my computer that the ‘internet service’ has gone down, to which my standard response is to go into the room when it enters my home, ‘re-boot it’ by switching it off at the mains, leaving it for two minutes, ‘re-start’ my computer … and hope that, when the internet has re-arrived … and the computer has re-started … I’ll have my internet access restored.

Sometimes it is … and sometimes it isn’t (whereupon I repeat the process … or just go off and take a break in the hope it might return of its own accord at some point later).

All the above registered, it’s not all doom and gloom, chaps!

Yesterday I had my land line phone restored to full working order, courtesy of my cable service provider company, who sent an engineer (the third since I first rang them in December requesting the repair –  or was it restoration? – of my land line).

This was after about two and a half years since it first ‘gave up the ghost’ and I subsequently learned to operate completely via my smartphone for all phoning purposes. All that is now left is the ‘negotiation’ with said company over the 30 months during which I was paying £24.50 per month for rental of my land line but never actually made a call on it because it wasn’t working.

I’m not holding my breath, but I’m just keeping my fingers crossed, now it’s working again, that it will still be doing so in another week’s time.