Running With Technology

Now before you assume I’m one of those who detest, or are petrified of technology, I’m not. I work on a laptop/desktop, browse online, giggle at Twitter, waste time on YouTube, and yawn at LinkedIn. I even do all this on my phone. But increasingly, it feels like I’m trying to run a marathon alongside a cheetah. No matter how many warm-ups I do or how much water I drink, it feels like it’s always miles ahead, somewhere on the horizon, while I’m gasping, clutching my stomach, stumbling alone crying, “Wait up!”. But technology doesn’t give a shit. It keeps sprinting further, a wise and evil grin on its face.

A few years back I got a smart phone. In those days they had a QWERTY keyboard. You need to have fingertips the size of a two-year old to type fast on those. Incidentally, most two-year olds do type faster than me. Nevertheless, with practice and patience I became fast and quick at typing, even with my fat fingers. The moment I was really good at it, everyone got a touch screen phone. One day I was buying tomatoes when I had to message someone. The bhajiwalla cracked up watching me struggle. “Madam, smart fone le lo! (Madam, get a smart phone!)” He waved his sleek golden iPhone at me. I became as red as the tomatoes and upgraded the next week.

Now I’m happy with this touch screen business, but I’m struggling to keep pace with the apps. Companies suddenly decide they will shut down their websites and provide only the app. Every hour some app or the other needs an upgrade, and cries for attention, like an annoying baby with loose motions.

The other day I was talking to a friend about how we used to chat over landlines. Her 15-year-old cousin was in the room, playing some video game on his phone. He overheard us and looked petrified. Turns out, he thought landlines were the cousins of landmines, and we used explosives. Now that’s what mobile technology does to people’s brains. It’s called a smart phone because it’s often smarter than it’s owner.

And it’s not limited to phones. For some reason, Gmail will keep twiddling with their user-interface. They say it’s for ‘improvement’, but it sends people like my mum into a flap. By the way, I’m now a Google Help Centre. I spend hours answering questions like this:
“Where has the password space gone?”
“I can’t find Drive? Where did they put it?”
“How do I see this attachment?”
“Where did reply-all go?”
“What is the green circle near my name?”

 I keep reassuring mum that a computer is 
a) a machine 
b) does not think but only follows orders and 
c) will never bite her or explode. 

I want Google to either give their employees something better to do, or pay me as a Help Centre.

I started using a computer for work in 2001. Floppy disks were on their way out, and compact disks were on their way in. That was the last time I was actually riding the crest of the technology wave. After I had a massive collection of CDs, they vanished overnight and were replaced by the USB drive. And then they made USB drives so tiny, that I was forever losing them. So I started swallowing them for safekeeping. All my work is saved on little USBs somewhere in my intestine. It couldn’t be safer.

Passwords have become tricky fellows. They can no longer be sensible words like ‘woof’, or ‘password’. Websites prompt me to use my great-granduncle’s middle name, the date of the Crimean War, then type it all backwards with random capitalized letters. Besides, we’re told not to keep the same password across different websites. I’ve been working on my very own Encyclopaedia of Passwords, and I’m on Volume 3. I suggest you do too.

Now of course, everything is ‘in the cloud’. All our words, photos, thoughts, opinions, lives, are floating in one massive nest somewhere in the sky. This should make things easy, and it does, to a large extent. I’m just waiting for the day we can upload our brains to the cloud. But I suspect that some people (like that 15-year old I told you about), already have.

Also published @medium