I read with amusement this week of the kind of things that now come with internet connectivity. It seems we can’t seem to go for 5 minutes without reaching for our Blackberrys and iPads to check on our Tweets. Even most TV’s these days are capable of showing YouTube clips of laughing babies and dogs with sunglasses.
One newspaper illustrated the story with a photograph of "a typical TV remote" featuring "43 baffling buttons", annotated with captions telling you what each of these buttons did, just to make it look even more complex and bewildering: "cursor up", "cursor down", "a/v input connector 1", "device mode", and so on.
The thing is, there weren't enough buttons for my liking. Unlike my easily-confused mother, I love a complicated TV remote. They should have even more stuff on them: dials and joysticks and flashing lights. I yearn for a remote with its own mouse.
And I don't want a manual. I like to work out what each nubbin does through trial and error, poking it and staring at the screen. Best of all is the "menu" button, which grants you access to a whole new array of on screen options, replete with little icons and sliding scales. Sit me in front of a brand-new telly and it's the first thing I'll reach for, because new tellies often come with surprising and exotic new features provided by the gods of technology.
Cor !! I can design my own font for the subtitles !! Wow! I can flip the picture sideways so I don't have to lift my head if I'm lying perpendicular on the sofa !! And look !! There's a slider for adjusting the level of regional accents! Now I can make the Geordie bloke who narrates “Big Brother” sound like a Cornish fisherman !!
I'll happily spend hours fine-tuning everything to my liking. Woe betide anyone who hits the ‘restore default settings’ button. That's like smashing a piece of ornate pottery I've created or scrawling graffiti all over an oil painting I’ve done of St Paul’s Cathedral.
I tend to assume other people share my obsessive need to examine the settings until everything is just so, and get genuinely enraged when I go to someone's house and discover, say, that they're watching programmes in the wrong aspect ratio. My Nan is one of the worst offenders: she'll blithely sit through a repeat of “Dad's Army” that is unnaturally stretched across the screen so that the entire cast look like Stewie Griffin from “Family Guy”.
Faced with this, primal instincts rear up and over-ride my modern-man cool-headedness, I get acute back-seat-driver anxiety, and end up hectoring them like an exasperated pilot trying to teach a four-year-old how to fly a helicopter.
The last time I was on a plane, I was sitting beside a woman who couldn't comprehend how the in-flight entertainment system worked. The thing was she didn't understand the difference between the controls on my armrest and hers. There I was, halfway through “Iron Man”, when she patted cluelessly at my controls and switched it off. So I started it again, and then she hit my fast-forward button.
At this point, I politely explained what was going on and attempted to help her operate her own system. She nodded and went "ooh" and "ahh", but try as I might, she just didn't get it. Ten minutes later, she stopped my film again, and kept doing so intermittently throughout the flight, sometimes switching my overhead light on for good measure, as if it was just to annoy me.
Her screen, meanwhile, displayed nothing but the synopsis for an episode of “One Foot in the Grave”, which she'd selected by accident but simply never played.
She just sat there, staring at the synopsis for four straight hours.
However, reverse the situation - put me in a 1940s household, say, and ask me to operate a mangle, and the chances are I'd earn her contempt with an equal display of ineptitude. But it isn't the 1940s. It's now. So snap out of it. Hit the right buttons or get left behind, you medieval dunce.
Do you want the evil robots to take over ??
Because that's exactly what'll happen if we don't all keep up.
And it’s not as if I am immune to techo-rage myself. My old computer included a bit of speech-recognition software designed to prevent Repetitive Strain Injury by letting you talk instead of type, but I gave up after I spent more time correcting its mistakes. It got every sixth word wrong, which meant you'd swear in exasperation, and it would think you had finished each sentence by saying, 'Offer god’s ache', and then type that in too.
But my favourite moment of this nature will forever be one from during my student days, when a friend’s mum rang him with what sounded like some terrifying news;
“It’s your Father dear, I’m afraid he’s had an accident”.
My friend steeled himself for the worst, only to hear the reply;
“He’s deleted the printer icon from his desktop, how does he get it back again ?? ....”
I’ve never seen such relief on another human being’s face since.