Karamba!
I may be well into my seventh decade but I have rights and feelings just like any other human being. When you think about the Earth’s insignificance in the vastness of the entire universe and the apparent randomness of the chances of life ever evolving at all, let alone to where it has now, there are just so many things that we take for granted that we ought not.
Having acknowledged that, I am not alone on this organ in occasionally ranting about being left behind by modern technology and means of communication generally – and then the phenomenon of gradually coming to terms with it to the point where I just don’t care anymore – arguably, it’s just a natural and understandable rite of passage for any oldie.
And then I come to my overnight experience this morning.
Do you remember the old days when mobile phones were just invented and were about the size of a house brick each? With some sort of aerial sticking out the top – and we were waddled about with shoulder-holsters bulging beneath our suit jackets as if we were alongside Clint Eastwood in a movie about CIA agents protecting the President?
Or, more particularly in today’s context, the days before broadband was even invented and we all had to wait for a tedious ‘going online’ routine (with the ‘dip-dip-dip’ sound of dialling going on in the background) tying up our computer for what seemed like minutes at a time before we had a chance of reaching even our earliest email accounts?
That’s how it was for me yesterday.
I was staying away from home, deep in the country. There was a computer available in the drawing room of my hosts – I knew that, and ordinarily it works satisfactorily, so I paid it no heed in advance … as we ate supper last night, chatted, watched the news on television, and then went to bed.
Up this morning – well okay, in the middle of the night – as usual, I made myself a coffee and fired up said computer.
The first thing I noted was that everything was happening rather slowly – that is to say, more slowly than usual and/or than I was expecting.
The second was that a box appeared at right hand bottom of the screen announcing that ‘my’ McAfee internet protection software subscription had not been renewed and that ‘I’ was now at risk.
I’m not a fan of ‘protection’ software, being long convinced that – once anyone on the internet has your bank details – your precious bank account can be plundered without you knowing – or at least, without you finding out unless you’re particularly hot on checking this sort of thing. Specifically – if I’ve owned say ten computers of various types in my lifetime – I’m not altogether sure that either ten different software protection providers (or even one of them multiple times) aren’t still taking an annual subscription from me … sometimes on computers that I discarded ten or even fifteen years ago.
Anyway.
I struggled internally past that issue and then went on the internet via the Google Chrome icon. Everything took an age to come up. When I went to my favourite ‘radio’ app, the radio station concerned took an age to connect … and then kept dropping out … I should say six or seven times so far as I type this.
Every time I went to the online version of a newspaper it also took minutes to appear (with that little ‘I’m busy’ circle endlessly turning over … as if the computer was trying to give the impression it was doing something important when in fact it really wasn’t).
After an hour and a half of this – and two ‘reboots’ of the computer to see if this might possibly cured the temporary ill – I’m grown sufficiently bored and fed up with my plight that I’m giving up my attempt to compose and post a blog this morning.
As you can imagine I’m fed up to the back teeth with this situation. I may be sixty-something years old but what’s the world coming to if I cannot wake up in the morning, fire up my computer, go straight on the internet and post something to the most popular and important website on the globe?
There – that’s it, My first ever non-post to the world … [and this has taken over an hour to achieve] …
