With my eightieth birthday slipping into the dim and distant past, I’m finding myself (in time-honoured tradition) losing patience with modern life. I really believed I was keeping up with things like computers, mobile phones, air fryers and the like. Almost overnight things have become complicated, confusing and sometimes downright ridiculous. When my new mobile phone asked me, after I had chatted to a friend for ten minutes, how I rated the quality of the phone call, the temptation to hurl the machine over the nearest wall was hard to resist. Who wants to know and WHY??? It’s nobody’s business but MINE!
AND, as for this Mr Al Gorithm. His spies are everywhere, even looking over my doctor’s shoulder as he writes me a prescription for thyroid tablets. Almost since that very moment I have been bombarded with lengthy lectures from women, who think they look like Meryl Streep, delivering a surfeit of verbal information implying my doctor hasn’t a clue and I am going to suffer horribly if I don’t add certain tablets to my diet. (Which of course, for a few weeks only, are on special offer if I buy five hundred).
Somehow Mr Gorithm has also worked out I like funny stuff like Fawlty Towers which he dishes out in little bits that leave me frustrated and sad that I have wasted the time to look at them; stupid images of animals that I know have been ‘altered’ and recipes that can only be completely revealed after I have pressed or swiped something or other I really don’t want to be bothered to get the hang of. No wonder school children are being affected by these machines when supposedly responsible adults like me can be coerced into wasting even a minute on one of them.
All the LGBT stuff about pronouns slid under my radar until my brother-in-law showed me a school report about his grandson which was an analysis of the child’s reading prowess. (Brilliant, of course, otherwise I wouldn’t have been shown it) In one of the paragraphs the teacher writes, “George’s reading is advanced for his/her age …..”. Surely the teacher should know what sex the child is if she knows so much about his reading, and hasn’t she left out ‘its’? Confusing.
When I got my new phone (with no instructions of course) I cut incoming calls off for days because no one had told me to swipe up. I have also had to learn to swipe down and across. As soon as I get used to one wonderful ‘innovation’ it’s time to get used to another. When is it going to stop? When are all the ‘innovators’ going to get old like me and what is going to frustrate THEM? I wish I could be around to see it happen.
Maybe some of them will have discovered that spending time in the fresh air, taking in birdsong, digging a bit, watching butterflies, reading a book or sharing a cup of tea is what real life is all about. Perhaps.
Felicity was born in Cheshire in England in 1941. At the age of five she was dragged, kicking and screaming, to Northern Ireland where she (later) married, had a family and has been living ever since. Among other things, she has been a secretary, a BBC Radio reporter, a veterinary assistant, director of a local Saleroom (Temple Auctions), obtained a degree in Fine and Applied Art at the University of Ulster and has recently published her debut novel, “Days of Wine and Wardrobes”.
She now lives near Lisburn with her cat, Wudi.
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