Nothing is easy

“Computers make things easier!”

There was a time when that little mantra might have been a source of fond hope.  There was, who knows how long ago, a sort of tipping point where the manifest failures of new technology were offset by the promise that after a few tweaks everything would be button pushing easy!

I remember as a smallish child I was given a Maths Computer to try out by a friend of the family, no, bugger that designation, he was my uncle in all but name.  He was a maths lecturer and was able to get his hands onto all the newest technology and I was privileged to try it out.  And it was, indeed exciting to feel that one was in the vanguard of modern education – well, more playing around with a gadget, even if that gadget was to do with maths!

As this ‘computer’ was in the late 1950s you might wonder what it looked like.  It was basically a long metal box with a little Perspex window in the centre with a coin-shaped cut out on the bottom right edge, and with a large button to be pushed along a notched groove parallel with the right hand side.  To work the machine, it had to be pre-loaded with a series of cards on which there were maths questions.  You used the button to load up a card which then presented the viewer with a maths question that you read through the little Perspex window and there was a space underneath the window for you to write in your answer.  After the answer was written, you pushed the button up a notch; your answer was now behind the window and the official answer was revealed and you could put a tick or a cross in the little coin cut out and push the button on to get a new question and a new space for your answer!

How cute that now seems!  And there were design flaws as the mechanism rucked up the paper and the whole thing had to be disassembled to get it going again.  But the excitement of being a pioneer never left me and unfortunately dictated my technology buying infatuation for the future.

As soon as they became available for general consumption I bought calculators, digital watches, handheld computers, personal assistants, computers, radios, cameras – you name it and I bought it, as long as it had electronic thingies making it function.

And most of them failed or crashed or simply let you down.  One computer, my Sinclair QL, actually reduced me to tears after the keyboard froze and, in spite of my plaintive pleadings with it to work, it steadfastly did not.  I retired to my bedroom and sobbed into the pillow knowing that I would have to work all night to get the work done that I had to do by the morrow.  Those were the days when ‘saving’ a document could take a couple of minutes and the computer would be inoperative during this time.  I hadn’t saved and I had to redo.  I went to bed at 6.30 am and got up at 7.30 am for a full day in school!

And that was not the only time that faith in computers was misplaced.  How many program failures, software failures and messages like “FATAL SYSTEM ERROR!” with a digital bomb fizzing on the screen have seared themselves into my technological memory.  I can remember buying programs where the developers encouraged users to report failures so that the inevitable bugs could be ironed out.  Bug free was the impossible dream; bug ridden was the everyday reality.

But when things worked it was like magic!  And that remembered ecstasy was enough to get one through the difficult times when nothing appeared to be working, nothing would print, nothing would load up properly and the screen was blank.  But we were encouraged to think that all the machines (all the expensive machines when you compare them with what you get for your money now) that we used were John the Baptist Computers, all of them preparing the Way for The Computer that would truly be The One!  I’m still waiting!

Where, you might ask, does all this come from?  What has prompted this remembrance of technological pain past?  The simple answer is, buying a ticket on line.

For the first time in a long time I am not going to the opera alone.  I have a fellow enthusiast accompanying me!  As I am a season ticket holder I can get a small discount on extra tickets and I offered to purchase a ticket in the hope that the discount would be able to buy us a cup of coffee at the interval at least.  As it turns out the discount may stretch to a couple of small beers, if we are lucky.  But that is not the point; the point is that simply purchasing the thing was a bind.

Buying a ticket has to be thought of in terms of how easy using the computer is to purchase it compared with picking up the phone and doing it via a real person at the other end of the line.

It took me two attempts and to complete the operation (in spite of the fact that I am a registered season ticket holder) and necessitated re-setting my pass word for the boking site; using the details on my credit card; using details on my season ticket; taking a code from my mobile phone; taking a further code from my email account; filling in part of a form; deciding just which of the many reductions I was entitled to; other bits and pieces and, finally, printing out the ticket myself on my own machine – and for all this I was charged a €1.50 fee for -  what exactly?

Would it have been easier on the phone?  I think the answer is probably yes, it would have been easier, but my ticket might have been waiting for me in the theatre, rather than being in my hot little hands. 

And, as usual, I will know what to do the next time round.  This is the ‘Billy Bookcase Syndrome’ based on the famous bookcase of the same name in IKEA.

The Billy bookcase is one of the basic pieces of furniture that is sold in the millions.  Countless people have unpacked the bits, looked at the illustrated page of instructions and thought to themselves, “Well, this can’t be that difficult!”  Then they try and make it and find that, yes, the basic principles are fine and easy to understand, but then the ‘why didn’t they mention’ element creeps into the creation: the unstated assumptions of the obvious that neophytes need to know, nay, need to be told.  And as you make the first Billy bookcase you know that the second and succeeding ones are going to be so much easier.  In reality, of course, that attitude is one of the ‘saving lies’ by which we live our lives.  However, the general principle holds true: the second time is easier than the first.

The real tragedy of this shared experience is that the results of that experience are not shared and therefore do not appear to inform a reworking of the instructions to include the things that you thought you didn’t need to point out.

Remember, we live in a world where someone bought a mobile home and when the owner went on a drive they put the home into ‘automatic’ and then went to make a cup of tea, as they assumed that ‘automatic’ meant that the thing would drive itself.  After the inevitable crash, the owner of the van sued the manufacturer for not making it clear what ‘automatic’ would and wouldn’t do!  And won. 

If that story is any reflection on the standard of public understanding then it is difficult to imagine any set of rules for anything like building a pre-fabricated bookcase being smaller than War and Peace!

But in my specific case I say, bring on the next person who wants me to buy a ticket for the Opera, I’m prepared!  I think.


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Lost!

Sometimes a harsh reality can break through the façade of domestic tranquillity.

 

It did tonight.

We had both just suffered through an evening meal of such unrelenting austerity that a cup of tea or coffee appeared to be an absolute luxury.  I was shuddering my way through the tales of terror that make up the stories in The Guardian nowadays, lurching in despair from the lunacy of 45, through the on-going self-harm of Brexit, via the laughable ideas of democracy and justice in Spain to various natural and man made disasters, when the front gate intercom buzzed into life.

We do not usually have unannounced visitors at night time so picking up the intercom to answer is usually tinged with concern.

It was our next-door neighbour who had found a small girl wandering the streets, lost and without a parent.  She wanted to know if anyone spoke Russian, as the little girl appeared not to speak anything else.  We could only offer Spanish, Catalan and English, with a smattering of French.  No use!

But after, regretfully putting down the phone, I thought of the large detached house opposite, which has, in the past been occupied by Russian speakers, so I slipped on my coat and went down to the street.

Our next-door neighbour was walking along with a very small child taking one hand and carrying a small scooter in the other.  She was accompanied by another neighbour from a few doors down with whom we had yet to speak.  The little girl was distressed and close to tears but she was comforted by my next-door neighbour with motherly hugs.

Obviously the police had to be informed, but my suggestion of trying to get someone from the big house on the corner to speak to the kid was taken up and, as I had seen lights there from our kitchen window which is at first floor level, I knew that there were people at home.

We buzzed through and we were greeted with an entire family exiting and our discovery that the kid did speak Russian and so did they, but they did not know who she was.  The son of the household was obviously asked if he recognized her and he replied in the negative.

Although the Russian family offered to take the girl in and contact the authorities, I felt that as the police had already been called, it was important to wait for them and a neighbour went to the outside of our houses and eventually brought the police back.

It then appeared that the police knew where the mother was and that the kid had wandered off and managed to put ten blocks between her mother and herself before she was taken into protective care by my neighbour.  Neighbour and girl were asked into the police car and with much happiness and thanking on all sides, they slipped away into the darkness.

Throughout this incident, I kept thinking how my own mother would have reacted.  And then stopped myself because it was too distressing to contemplate.  Even in its hypothetical state and allowing for the fact that my mother is no longer around to be concerned.

My parents told me that I had to be watched at all times when I was smaller as, given any opportunity, I would be away like (as my father used to say confusingly) “a long dog”! 

My crawling ability was legendary and my mother told me that I had to be “attached” to the sides of my crib to keep me in it.  This didn’t always work, as on one occasion I was found to be out of the crib, crawling along with a side still attached to me.

As soon as I could walk I was put in reins in a desperate attempt to keep me in the same locality as my parents, but again, my mother said that letting the reins slip from her hands or putting them down for a moment to pick up and examine some article she needed to buy in a shop was an opportunity for escape that I never rejected.

The only time that I can recall that I “escaped” by mistake was when I was too small to see over the counters in M&S.  As a six foot adult I find it difficult to think back to a time when I was so small, but I know I was because my early memories of M&S were of the wood veneer of the sides of the counters, of nothing interesting to see, and of light in the store that was far too bright.  On one occasion I was standing next to my father and when his trousers moved so did I.  I must have been in a mood of mildly sullen obedience as I traipsed around with nothing more than featureless material to keep my attention.  Eventually I got bored with this textured landscape and looked upwards towards my Dad’s face.  And it wasn’t him.  I had been following a strange man’s trousers!

I can still remember the bemusement I felt, but not how quickly the situation was remedied.  Knowing my mother, and her constant observation and monitoring of my potential fugitive propensities, it must only have been seconds.  But seconds are not what the event felt like.  I can remember no panic.  Which is interesting.

When I was a small child in the 1950s in Cathays in Cardiff, I was allowed to play out on the road with my friends - and this, remember, was with a mother who was close to paranoid (no, make that clearly paranoid) about my safety.  But I was allowed to play, and nothing much happened to me apart from the usually scratches and cuts.  There were also very few cars around then and the streets were generally empty.

I could be playing streets away from home, but I was trained to listen for my father’s distinctive whistle and reappear in double quick time.  Which I did, sometimes disappearing from a friend’s house in mid-sentence at the sound of the whistle!  

When we had a dog, the same whistle was used for her, but I have to say that I was much more responsive than she ever was.  Well, she was a pedigree Labrador!  And everyone knows what they are like!

So, the small girl is now reunited with her mother.  How will the kid think about this experience in the future?  As an interestingly confused experience with a group of people she saw once, with police and people speaking different languages, something to think back on and giggle?  Or something altogether more serious: something that threatened her worldview that showed her just how fragile what she thought she knew was?  Who knows?  Nothing happened, but what might have happened is too awful to contemplate.

And what of the mother?  As I’ve said, thinking of my mother sends shivers of horror down my spine.  I know that my mother would, instantly, have thought the worst and suffered indescribably until my return, and then she would have blamed herself and . . . well, you get the idea.  The delight of reunion would have been overshadowed by the dark imaginings of what might have been.

But let’s be positive.  The girl is safe and has been returned. 

And who knows what memory will make of what has been?

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If you would like to read drafts of my recent poems please go to:                                                smrnewpoems.blogspot.com