Monday 4 April 2016

I have to take this...

Small things make me very happy. I am ecstatic just by having an email system that works - the sort of thing that most people take for granted - like hot water coming out of a tap, which is a convenience we were missing for a couple of weeks as well. Just imagine what it must be like to not even have cold water coming out of a tap.

The house where I live was built when water was extracted from outside wells by servants, and everything else was left outside (also by servants) in a covered bucket for the 'night soil men' to collect. Dining rooms had screens in the corner which hid a pot for everyone to piss in.

It seems crazy that the things that even my generation take as a basic human right would have - only a few years ago - been seen as a scientific impossibility. Universal access to the Internet. To the WHAT?!

Cro has been complaining (quite justifiably, in my opinion) about everyone being constantly glued to a phone screen these days, but I think this phenomena will be relatively short-lived. I cannot imagine that the next generation will think it acceptable to consult their phones for Facebook or email up-dates during dinner parties or stage plays - in fact I am astounded that the present one thinks it is. Well, they know it is wrong, but Facebook and text messages have somehow taken precedence over basic manners, and it will take physical violence to make them think otherwise.

H.I. is possibly the only person I know who refuses to use an ordinary mobile phone, let alone a smart one. My simple phone is a tool which I really can not now do without, and if I - like many others I know - refused to pick up to a witheld, private number, then I would have lost much money from secretive clients. I now view mobile phones as a basic human right, like bank accounts or universal suffrage.

Same with automobiles. I can no longer do without a car. In the days when only one in ten young people owned a car, I once spent a whole year never leaving one square mile of this town, and was mildly shocked when I realised this. These days, most young people cannot afford even an old car, so are condemned to make their working environments fit the situation - walking to work at MacDonalds, for instance.

Every time I go to the pub (which is not infrequently) someone comes up and sits next to me in the near-empty bar, then pulls out a phone and fiddles with it, staring at it for about an hour. It is saying something about society when they become offended when I tell them that if they want to use their phone they should go and sit in a corner to do it.

19 comments:

  1. I'm still unnerved by people who walk around alone speaking out loud as though responding to unnamed voices in their head. Which they are, thanks to the tiny bluetooth thingies they clipped to their ear.

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    1. I'm used to that now. I still think they are mad though, even if they really are speaking to someone else.

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  2. What do teenagers moan about? I want to annoy them.

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  3. Sadly, these days it is easier to fiddle with a phone than to strike up a conversation with a fellow human being. Mind you, it is far less likely that the phone will be surly in response. Why do you think taking out a phone feels more offensive than the same person taking out a book?

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    1. I never said that. I feel just as angry about someone who sits next to me in the pub, reading a newspaper. They are both solitary occupations. If they started masturbating as if I wasn't there, then at least that might be entertaining.

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  4. Look at it this way. If I ever turned up ay your pub you wouldn't have to speak to me. My face would be in my phone.

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  5. Indoor plumbing changed the world. Phones obviously have, too. Let's wait and see.

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    1. Computers certainly did, and these days, computers are phones.

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  6. I must be one of the remaining few who had to go down to the 'lav' at the bottom of the garden in the dead of night. And whose Dad emptied the offending bucket under the damson tree each Saturday morning. Those were the days.
    As to young folk consulting their phones constantly - such a conversation killer - and sadly not just the young. I had a friend in her fifties here the other week and she just could not stop fiddling with her phone. Very irritating.

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  7. Wait. You expect the next generation to revert to dinner parties and stage plays?

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    1. No, but if they do then I expect them to pay attention.

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    1. I know. Thank fuck for that - I was fearing a two-year court-case.

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  9. What I really mind is when people who are on their cell phones stop everything that they were just doing, just to tend to the phone. They lose all situational awareness to what's going on around them. They abandon a conversation in mid-sentence and expect what? That the other person hangs around, glued to a conversation that is not theirs and waits for the moment that the attention of the phone addict reverts back to them? I also hate people who stop unexpectedly and smack-dab in the middle of the isle at a grocery store because their phone demands their attention. And the world has to move around them.

    Here is something that I read the other day, and I really like it: When they discover the center of the universe, some people will be surprised that they are not it.

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  10. It's all modern lack of manners. My pet hate is when the person on the cash desk also has to answer the phone. I believe that we in the queue were there first and the one on the phone is pushing in.

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