We didn’t have a turkey so there was no possibility of
inspecting the entrails to use an augury for the new year, so I looked around
for something more metaphorical and discovered that my smartwatch had run out
of power. So New Years Eve on the lead
up to the strokes of midnight and the eating of the twelve grapes of luck were
accompanied by a woefully blank watch face attached to my wrist as I had omitted
to bring the charger with me to Terrassa.
As with all electronic equipment with a visual display, there
is nothing quite so dead as a blank screen.
So as everyone else checked their watches with the time displayed on the
television, I merely saw the gleam of darkness on the black glass covered
screen with occasional bright spots from the ambient light reflected from the
useless decoration on my wrist.
My Pebble (O happy memory!) is now long gone, replaced by the
Amazfit, but not quite compensating for the loss. Pebble used to send cheerful and positive
messages like, “Your Pebble is powered until this evening!” encouraging you to
recharge – and a single Pebble recharge would last well over a week for
me. Then the firm sold themselves and
their product and the Pebble ceased to be and for me, all the replacements have
been pale reflections of the excellence of the product now gone.
Anyway, there might have been some sort of message, but it is
easy to overlook that in the hectic build up to and recovery from
Christmas. What was indubitable was the
blank face of timelessness that I stubbornly kept on my wrist in spite of the
fact that it didn’t even look mildly attractive as a bracelet! I found it interesting that I preferred to
have the dead thing on my wrist rather than nothing. Even though my phone tells the time, I need a
watch, I feel strangely bereft and naked without one – but then I am also the
person who has continued to buy CDs to play in the car even though it shows up
my Luddite tendencies as far as real gadget freaks are concerned. It is the technological equivalent of using a
hand loom – the next thing I will do is dress up as a woman and start burning
down toll gates!
When I did think about my powerless watch, and I did that
often during the evening in the compulsive way that people have in looking at
their watches in spite of not needing to know the time, I thought it was
anything but a positive omen to go into the new year with my tekke credentials
in tatters.
By way of compensation, we have started to Alexa-ify our
home, starting with an Echo Spot and a selection of smart plugs. It is now possible to turn on the television,
lights (domestic and tree) and kettle with words of command.
Or at least it would be if the words of command were in
English. In a further effort to make me
use what little Spanish I have, Toni has set up Alexa to respond in
Spanish. And it/she does to him, but
it/she takes grave exception to my pronunciation of the language and goes into
length diatribes about how she has not been programmed to respond to my
outlandish version of the language that she finds perfectly easy to understand
when voiced by Toni. If nothing else it
will force me to improve my pronunciation of certain key words in Spanish, or I
will be forced (o misery!) to switch things on by hand! To demonstrate that I am getting better, I
have just switched the television on and off and opened a classical music radio
station from where I am sitting and typing – and adjusted the volume!
When I explained to a friend in the UK on the telephone that
we had just installed the first gadgets of Alexa he was astonished that I had
done it earlier. And he has a
point. As an ‘early adopter’ of any
flashy gadget-type innovations it is certainly something that should have been
up and running long before 2019!
Which brings me back to my dead watch. Apart from the fact that I obviously misread
the tiny power indicator on the watch face before I left and, as we were only
staying overnight, I assumed that there was enough power to see me through and
therefore I was fully justified in not taking the small unique charger, what
did that black empty face indicate?
Perhaps I read too much into trivial, unrelated items and
give them a significance that I know (really) they do not deserve. But the dysfunctionality is suggestive of so
many aspects of what is likely to occur in 2019 both domestically and also
internationally that it is tempting to see the blank face of stopped time as
Fate trying her best to blank out what is in the future!
For my watch, it only took a return home and the placement
(with a firm click) into its charger for power to be returned. Though, as a further illustration of how
metaphor can extend into the real problems of the future, the watch did not
start working without a ‘re-start’ a force loading of the app to get it going
again. After what has happened in 2018,
many aspects of life that we took for granted will be forced into a ‘re-start’
in 2019. And those ‘re-starts’ are not
going to be quite as easy as the two side buttons press that was all it took to
get my watch operational.
Still, I remain absurdly optimistic, even though blatantly,
outwardly pessimistic, and look forward to the year ahead.
If nothing else, it should see a couple of my
books published, and seeing those through the press (what a quaintly outmoded
expression for what actually goes on) and that will keep me occupied, and more
importantly, give me something else to concentrate on when the idiocies of the
world around me become too much to bear!
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