Welcome to the Electronic Age
Something truly momentous has occurred. No, not the rise of the oppressed masses or the second coming of Christ, something far more exciting a bit less hyped up.
I have acquired the Internet.
Now I am not the most technologically minded of people. I fail spectacularly to see the point of mobile phones that come with built in CD players, satellite navigation, microwaves, sun beds and cappuccino machines. Nonetheless, I decided to take the plunge.
I would like to point out that I am not completely gadgetally challenged. I did at one point know quite a bit about computers and could spiel off about numerous scientific minutiae of their working components until the RAM came home, but the trouble is technology develops so fast these days that it has long since belted off into the horizon like an Olympic sprinter, leaving me wheezing in the gutter like the token asthmatic kid on a school cross country training session.
And this is not for want of trying. Unfortunately the kind of people I know who have all this stuff are also the kind of people who curl up in a ball laughing hysterically whenever I try to engage with their world though a seemingly innocent question like "What's Wifi?" The kind of people who spend half their lives thrusting tiny intimidating silver objects into my face and telling me how I MUST get one "because you won't know how much you need it until you've tried it." Well you know what, the same could be said for heroin but you won't see me lining up outside the ghetto to have a stab at that just for the thrilling eye-opener of finding out what withdrawal feels like.
Ironically, the other half of their lives is spent complaining when the technology doesn't work the way it's supposed to, or whinging about how much they miss it when they lose it down the back of the sofa or it fails completely and has to be sent back to the manufacturers to be beaten with special hi-tech sticks until mended or replaced with another identical model that will go wrong again in exactly the same amount of time as the first.
Forgive me for being a bit of a stick in the mud, but I remember when we didn't need all this stuff to get us through the day. Sure, life was a bit slower and the track lists were a bit shorter and there were fewer flashing lights and little buttons to press, but it WORKED. I'm sure at one point centuries ago there must have been a few sailors who scoffed at this newfangled compass thing as they had been getting by with their winning combination of the sun and a bit of wood for some time now and it was working very well thank you. And then one ill-fated day they ran aground off the coast of Essex on a particularly cloudy winter's evening and they begrudgingly agreed to give it a go.
Which is pretty much what's happened to me now.
The trouble is, you can't do ANYTHING without the Internet any more. You can only book for the theatre online. You can only get the cheap bus tickets online. You can only check your credit card statement online (presumably because the banks were sick of the queues getting bogged down by the bodies of all the heart attack victims). And I'm pretty certain in years to come expectant mothers will have to complete an online registration form just prior to delivery in order for the government to legally recognise the existence of their offspring.
So with this combination of necessity and the growing fear that any day now the locals were going to come running after me with pitchforks and burn me atop a huge rusty pile of VCRs and personal cassette players, I decided to register for my very own Internet account. Online, of course.
I got about three pages in before the step-by-step application process insisted I pay an extra £21.99 for an all-singing all-dancing something-or-other-enabled THING which I was certain I didn't need. Giving up on the internet, I phoned up and spoke to a very helpful young man with a very lovely accent who told me how right I was and I DIDN'T need the big fancy thingummie and he completed the process for me. I abandoned my rickety library PC and let the professionals get on with it.
Then my all-inclusive box o' technology arrived a few days later, the manual bragged to me how easy it was to set up. Put box on desk. Plug wire in here. Plug other end of wire into computer. Plug into power socket etc. I like wires. Despite all the wonderful things they say wireless can do, I still manage to draw comfort from the fact that I can SEE all the connections on the old 'box with wires' model and although they are probably pretty much neck and neck as far as efficiency goes, when something DOES break (and break it inevitably shall, because they ALWAYS DO) I find it cathartic to be able to take a sledgehammer to the bits that don't work as opposed to having to resort to yelling impotently at the invisible but still apparently broken air.
Again on the set-up process I got about three pages into before it asked for my password. I knew my password. I had told it to the man on the phone with the nice accent in a wonderful bit of security protocol that didn’t so much stretch the meaning of the term 'secure' as take a meat cleaver to it in a spectacular display of linguistic butchery that would have had Dr Johnson turning in his grave. But now it told me I had got it wrong. The manual helpfully told me that my password had been emailed to the email address provided by my new internet account, the uselessness of which was so utterly pants-on-head retarded I couldn't help but think that either the people who designed the system are all sadists or the good old-fashioned 'wires in a box' internet is now so obsolete they assume that people are only getting it for the benefit of some hilarious nostalgic wheeze and don't actually need it to ACCESS the internet because they can already do that via their phone or their TV or their arse or whatever.
I phoned the technical support line where the far less helpful man on the other end prised from me all my personal details and life story and very patiently talked me through all the stuff I had already done, no doubt in perfect accordance with the [ISP company name deleted to protect company integrity and author's kneecaps] technical guidelines and eventually informed me that he COULD tell me my password but only if I could tell HIM the second and fourth letters, a policy which I felt was sort of sidestepping the point. Indeed, it was avoiding the point with a determination that would suggest the technical support team are all vitamin-C deficient hypochondriacs and 'the point' is an over-affectionate leper coughing up blood. So I told him what I thought it was and he told me that, yes, that was indeed the password I was supposed to be entering. Only in capitals.
Well thank you very bloody much. Twenty five minutes down the line and five steps through the un-bypass-able technical support process, they had managed to extract thirteen quid from my wallet without so much as looking at it. Still, one expensive phone call later and a little bit of pointy-clicky and I was ready to go. And go I did, for all of fifteen minutes until a little red light went on and the modem packed up.
Computer error messages never cease to amaze me. Never before have so many long and complex sentences managed to be so utterly useless, and let's face it, the politicians have been giving them some pretty solid competition for years. I personally adore the Windows favourite: "An unexpected error has occurred." No it hasn't. I just took the CD out. You're a computer; you should be able to figure that out. There was nothing unexpected about it. If some pigeons had got caught in the CPU or I'd just smothered the DVD-ROM with marmite I could understand the confusion...
The one it gave me on this occasion was "the server has provided an invalid ISP address" or something. Only it hadn't. I knew it hadn't because it had been working twenty minutes ago and unless the ISP had moved house in that time the address should be the same. Why can't these things just be honest? "I HAD the ISP address a moment ago, but now I can't quite seem to lay my hands on it. I know it's around here somewhere. Maybe I left it in my other jacket...."
As it was, I clicked away at that boundless font of information known as the Microsoft Help Wizard, which proceeded to tell me that it couldn't do anything because it needed to go online. I don't really know why. Maybe it had some friends on Facebook and it wanted to ask for their opinion before committing to anything, so it suggested that I should get in touch with the manufacturer directly. Well thanks very much, Mr Gates.
Instead I relied upon my own intelligence and fell back upon my highly detailed and technical expertise regarding the infinitely applicable method of turning things off and on again. I tried the modem, the connection, the LAN (whatever that means), the phone line, and then finally the whole damned system, whereupon the CPU decided to brick it and refused point blank to have anything further to do with me. It just sat there in the desk sulking and no matter how many buttons I pressed and how many wires I twiddled I could not convince it to show even a glimmer of life.
This I considered to be my sign from the beyond that I should leave it to it and go and commit to written word this whole experience as a reminder of why I do NOT get along with this sort of thing. And I shall write it long hand. On paper. With a Biro. Or possibly a quill and a pot of ink. ANYTHING that doesn't involve wires and cables and drivers and little error messages that pop up every five minutes criticising my damned-well-perfect syntax.
There. That wasn't so hard, was it?