Giving up?
March 27, 2012
If there is one thing that could tip me over the edge, it would be that modern phenomena; the mobile phone. I have always been a difficult customer, perhaps not meant for anything much more complicated than opening an umbrella or rinsing out the tomato- sauce bottle.
Perhaps my inherited frugal gene is to blame, forever ferreting to save and scrounge for the maximum that costs the minimum. My days of hanging around a phone waiting for calls from friends have long since gone with most calls now coming from unknown sources urging me into the world of a Black-Berry or some other mysterious device. Change your plan through us, they text. “You’ll save with us”, is the lure that got me last time and is now the cause for ‘over the edge tipping.’
I have become a victim of a device that connects five other devices. It does so wirelessly but not effortlessly. All you need do is insert a little card and you get connected to all those devices. That card is called Sim-card. Don’t be fooled by its short name. It’s holding the whole world to ransom. It’s a terrorist in disguise.
My own aim has always been to seek simplicity and certain disconnectedness. This aim is probably steeped in wanting as little responsibility as is humanly possible and… A kind of laziness not to get involved in anything distracting me from …whatever it is that fills my head at the time, most likely, nothing much really.
My dream still is to live in a square room made of straw bales. It would have a wooden floor and a cozy wood heater in the middle. I would live out of a suitcase and eat simple food, may be lentils or smoked pork spare ribs with apples cooked with rhubarb and crumble on top, a simple glass of red wine afterwards…Sleep on a kapok mattress and read Patrick White’s Voss under a kerosene light.
With the $30. – Pre-paid mobile connectivity, it kept me reasonably in touch with any emergency that might pop up. The emergency might be a call from the hearing-aid centre for an appointment or a cheerful reminder that 80% credit has been used up, nothing much more than the most mundane of calls.
I often wished I could get an insight why so many are glued to those devices. If not held to their ears they have them in their hands and they are so busy flicking up and down, even sideways. What am I missing out on? What sort of fascinating world is escaping me?
I believe that undertakers are flat tack with people having been run over by semi-trailers while crossing the road and stroking their IPods, IPad and multiple other connect devices with numerous Apps and Blackberries stand alone. What a riveting world it all has come to!
My latest sojourn into that, to me denied, world of devices was an invite on my $30.- pre-paid for a WeiWah wire free Wi Fi modem that would connect up to five devices. Can you imagine; five devices? It was guaranteed to open a world hitherto unknown to me. Not only that, for a mere $49.95 a month it was going to give me 10 gigabytes of this ‘open world’. It was just too tempting.
Of course my ignorance in those matters I keep close to my chest. Not wishing to show my ignorance and lack of confidence in general, I quickly nod in agreement when experts try and inform and instruct me on device connectivity. Any gadget that uses electricity, especially if it has a screen with options and menus instantly fills me with dread.” Open up tools, please”, they tell me. “What tools”, I ask. I then quickly resort to seemingly understanding it all.
I can’t tell you how close I came to tipping over the edge. Optus must now be having conference calls over it. I became the despair of the Philippines call centre. India gave up on me a long time ago. No matter how patient they all were, nothing connected, nothing worked. I removed the dreaded Sim-card, wiped it and even put it in reverse, all to no avail (as they say in romantic novels when the hero just can’t seem to be able to seduce a recalcitrant virgin).
I must have spent an entire year of $49.50 per month in trying to find this so much desired connectivity. It finally turned out the mini Wi Fi WeiWah wire free was faulty. So, there you go. All that modernity, all those wonderful opening up of a new world, once again denied through a mere faulty ‘device’.
Where are the straw bales?
Tags: Blackberry, India, Ipad, IPod, Patrick White, Philipines, Sim card, Voss, WI FI Posted in Gerard Oosterman | Edit |
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
I can’t stand this woman’s voice.
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.http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/government-it/35-million-premises-on-nbn-in-three-years-20120329-1vztg.html#comments
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Or Conroy.He’s a wanker.
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Have you heard and observed mobile phones going off in Court? The stern look or rebuke. It could well sway a judgement.
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Gez, I’ll keep reading them if you keep them coming. Delightful.
“Sleep on a kapok mattress and read Patrick White’s Voss under a kerosene light”…made my day.
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Shoe,
Glad you liked that. As children we had kapok mattresses which my parents took from Holland to Australia. There were three mattresses to a bed and during the day they would be put out into the sun.
Kapok is hard to beat, doesn’t lose their loft like rubber or foam..
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None of you will be needing the NBN then?
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I thought it was your lot who don’t need the NBN?
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Good question V.L
Of course we like the coming of NBN. The internet is a modern version or continuity of a typewriter combined with a newspaper. But as for all those gadgets, that’s just a fashionable item like the skate board or scooter. Mainly for the young with disposable income.
Some years ago people were mad on electric whisks and mixers, they now get thrown out by the thousands after finding out that a hand held whisk is better and less messy. What about those fondue sets? All rusting in attics or landfill.
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I don’t need it. I’m happy with my 4G. Will I get a tax refund, for ‘not’ using it?
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There are courses available for unerdy macho-types like you and ato.
You probably qualify for a pensioner series of lessons. It would be helpful, as your grandchildren will soon have gadgets that haven’t even been invented yet.
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An elderly friend of mine was describing his neighbours new phone – one of those glide through life gadgets. She had been demonstrating it to him. She showed it could tell you where you were and what the temperature was! As if she didn’t already know that.
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Viv:
Yes, amazing how the time on the IPod is the same as on the watch. How do they know that? In Chile, some years ago, it was the envy of so many not talking on a mobile phone while driving, that some poor sods had imitation wooden phones that they were talking into. They were stopped by the cops who found out about those timber phony phones. Perhaps I should just get an solid oak Tablet and sit in the train showing off.
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And then, there’s the likes of me: Whenever I need to do a job, in the garden, in the shed, on the roof, in the olive tree, I go and buy the required tools, all afresh.
And then, then that’s it!
The thinking is, that once one buys the required tools, then the jobs will be done by them without any further toil from their owner! It occurs to me only weeks later (after a smack at the back of the head from the… good lady) that, in fact, I DO have to do the full measure of the toiling! What a bummer!
The IT world reminds me of my youth, during the days when I was looking for a car. Parents would put all their savings towards the best, or near best, available and affordable and then they’d insist I read the book of directions before I got behind the wheel. Hundreds of pages of mechanical information written in mechanospeak. I’d be an old man before I drove the damned thing out of the driveway. So, no, “I’ll read it later, dad.”
A month later, of course, the EK would conk out and I’d have no idea why or what to do about it.
All this ITspeak does my head in, as well, gez. I don’t understand how anyone understands it. Does the IT gadget have a mental telepathy function that only works with devotees?
Daughters speak with one another over their iphones (through their computers?) on skype! Elwood to Kashima! How the Hades does that happen? Forget that, I don’t want to know!
Incidentally, gez, it’s “phenomenon” in singular.
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Oh, how I wish!
How I wish that the little doodahs with the screens and buttons could show the delusional religionists, like Mark Christensen (latest Drum piece) that god has nothing to do with life or death, with reason or reasonlessness!
Such unmitigated crap! Such pompous shit!
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The logical result of endless new gadgets would have to be a Terminal Apple Tablet (T.A.T.) that does all living for you. You just stay in bed connected to this magic Tablet and all life will be sucked into the Tablet preventing you making mistakes and unexpected silly moves such as walking with Milo or talking to the birds etc. Then when it’s all over the Tablet disgorges you into a spoonful of ash.
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Coming home today I noticed two people with TWO iphones. I couldn’t understand why you’d need two. One of them was playing games on one whilst having a conversation on the other. I must be old fashioned reading a paper newspaper.
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One may have been an iPOD, although with 16gig available in the phone, one wonders why one would have two identical devices.
My son (the one in IT at Greenwich University), has two mobile phone. One is his own and private, the other is for work and paid for by his employer.
I have a drawer full of Hi Tech phones. .I’m using a $ 70. flip fone at the moment. I bought it brand new from a shop at February. It gets email and keeps dry when I drop it in the mud, walking the dogs….It has little plastic lugs that stop up the sockets… I have had several that get moisturised 😉
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Do battery charges multiply during the night? I have so many chargers now, far more than gadgets. Where do they all come from?
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Yes, it’s a devastating waste of resources. I too, have a drawer full. I hope to get rid of some in garage sale.Presumably people will only take them if they need them. Not to hoard.
There seems to be some progression with chargers. The are all using the same mini usb now. So they are interchangeable. One just has to check the voltage. They’re all pretty similar.
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No they were identical, they were iphones.
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Yes, that’s so spot on.
On tonight’s episode on the news there was a return of money for those not happy with their Apple ‘tablet’. The Australian 4 g’s are somehow different from the 4g’s elsewhere. What the fuck are they talking about? What does the 4g’s do?. What prevents the tablet from doing WHAT? Does it walk the dog, do the dishes or change the bed sheets? Apple must be feverishly thinking up new tablets for people spending their money. It’s like the modern world has designed a special vacuum system permanently attached to wallets sucking out money from the semi comatose public addicted to flickering images on a small screen.
I take an aspirin each night, the only tablet worth taking.
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We had some gentleman come round to give us a quote for an awning. Mrs M asked if they could quote on (1) a roof that was the same pitch as the gable, and (2) just a plain skillion roof. The blokes put all of the measurements into an iPad. Somehow I expected an instant printout.
‘No, well have to download the info into the computer at work, because we can’t figure out the pitch of the roof.’
Me. ‘But you’ve just measured the height of the gable and the width, with a scientific calculator we could work it out here.’
Them. ‘The iPad’s got a scientific calculator, we just don’t know how to use it.’
Forty second demonstration from Big M generated the necessary angle. Everyone thinks they’ve actually done or made something simply because they’ve downloaded, uploaded or bluetoothed. No-one seems capable of thinking unless they’re connected.
One problem we’ve identified at work is that mobile phones are an infection risk. They’re glued to the ear, or texting finger during everything from expressing one’s breasts to going to the toilet. When I was in New Orleans I was astounded that people couldn’t stop their mobile access even to take a piss. Christ knows what they do with them when they’re really alone!
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Ah, Mark… With an i-phone you’re never really alone… (Thank Gord I’ve still managed to resist the herding instinct and have avoided what is now, perhaps laughingly referred to as ‘mobile phone culture’…)
🙂
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We’re really struggling at work to stop the parents from bringing their dirty phones in, and allowing them to make contact with the baby and surrounding area, mainly because we can’t stop the nurses from doing likewise. It’s really important to stay connected to one’s social media, dontchno??
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One’s social media, Mark? Since I agree with Jean-Paul Sartre that ‘L’Infer c’est des autres!’ (‘Hell is other people!’) then Heaven would appear to be their absence… but I’m a solitary old curmudgeon…
However, in this wonderful 21st century we’re now ‘sold’ our sociality along with our internet connections and real human social relationships are, perhaps rightly (sadly) viewed with suspicion… the i-phone is not evidence of our ‘connectedness’ Big M, but of our atomization; our alienation.
😐
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“but I’m a solitary old curmudgeon…”
And getting worse!!
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I have to agree, I’ve had enough of talking, listening, educating, being supportive at work. Mobile phone is only switched on when I’m out of the house, but, not when mowing lawn, walking dog, etc. All these interruptions interfere with the voices in my head!
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This seems to me to be important dialogue. Why say I I think ‘important’? Why, I and me, self glued in an appropriate way and inappropriate ways to self cannot bleeding understand why Markamey we put people in wards to recover from the external world and its aggravations of existing, perhaps previously non-existing conditions when the circumstances are first admission, then appeared prepared to weave our way through inmates who are not in the least all that matey in the first place and perhaps sometimes over matey in the first place but luv-a-duck … fevrish. Then, I have observed patients weeping because someone has told them over the phone they need to get back to work, to school, or feed the pet goldfish and snap out of it. We need to get some perspective. Gone. All gone. Mobile phones ringing in hospital wards!?
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