Louisa Simmonds

I’ve been biting down on my lip a lot this week. Not in the sense of getting Christian Grey’s undies in a sexual twist, but biting my lip in angry frustration, over what I see as the limitations of technology.

I know you’ll agree with me when I say that we become much less tolerant as we get older, insomuch as we can’t suffer fools, couldn’t give a monkey’s ass about the ramifications of impulsive decisions and like to focus all our attention and vitriol on stuff that really pisses us off. Well, that’s exactly why the object of this week’s middle-aged tanty is the problem of modern ‘technology’, to which I seem to have unfortunately developed a life-threatening intolerance, that no amount of wine can seem to contain.

Because in spite of what my children would have you believe, I’m not a complete technophobe. How can I be when you consider where I’ve come from? Because I was one of those prehistoric women who actually typed their entire university dissertation with one finger and on one of the first word processors known to mankind; and who, since then, is completely self-taught in all other areas of advanced technology.

Sort of…

You see, there was none of that expensive workplace training shit in my day – no, I’ve had to bludgeon my way through Idiot’s Guides and Technology for Dummies’ books to gain the limited knowledge I have now, and yet, somehow…somehow, I have managed to botch up a couple of websites, several web pages and even learned how to use customised corporate programs and database systems.

Sort of…

So, the first of the two biggest problems I have with technology is that, (unlike men), it just keeps fucking evolving and needing to be updated. The second, (although my children will beg to differ with me and insist that I, alone, am the catalyst of all my techno-disasters), is that technology DOES go wrong.

OFTEN!

One of the symptoms of my intolerance is this technology sigh.

You see, I’m a naturally impatient, last-minute, kind of gal, who is always time-poor and forever chasing my tail, which is why I expect things to work, like, RIGHT NOW!

Not when the wind changes and the Internet connection suddenly decides to work or after my phone has decided to update itself just when I need it to function. Needless to say, technology rarely beats to my drum and in spite of living in one of the most advanced countries in the world, (and with a backup of Indian technology service behind us), our Internet connection is still as unreliable as a condom with a hole and we always seem to go offline or on go-slow during those critical moments when I’m uploading photos, responding to urgent emails or publishing a blog post.

Sigh…

And another thing…why is it that every time I decide to read an article on-line, some fucking advert or video starts, scaring the crap out of me and leading me to react involuntarily and in crazed mode, to hastily press every button I can see in an attempt to mute the volume, and then wonder why I can’t hear a fucking thing when I watch a video a few hours later?

And NO, just because I accidentally stray onto your website, does not mean I want to subscribe to your fucking newsletter.

My children insist that I am the problem: that I’m just not intuitive when it comes to technology.

But when I make a phone call to an important client, I don’t expect my phone to suddenly switch to Facetime, (whatever the fuck that is), or go onto loudspeaker or even disconnect when I apply too much pressure to the side of the phone by accident; nor do I expect to have to update it within a week.

And yes, it is a medical curiosity that for some reason I can’t EVER remember my Apple password, which means that although I have shelled a vast proportion of my earnings on a useless piece of technological shit a very expensive Smartphone, I can’t actually do anything on it that I couldn’t do on my old brick phone.

Does technology hate you as much as it hates me?