Technology

I hate the new version of Microsoft Word. I don’t like the GPS lady’s tone. No one needs a phone with a light sabre on it (special consideration if you're an actual Jedi, in that case it would be extremely useful).

Not many people know this about me, but I came up with the idea for TIVO. Sadly I can’t take any legal action against the company that produces it, because I have no solid evidence. I never made a prototype due to that fact that when I came up with the idea, it was 1992, and I was five. I had neither the technology, nor the capacity, to piece together something like that. But how does a five year old come up with such an idea? From their dream of a simpler world, and their inability to work a VCR.

I resisted joining Myspace, then I resisted the move from Myspace to Facebook on the grounds that there’s no real difference between the two. You’ve got your friend requests, your status updates, that little “people you might know” box, which I never understood the point of. Yes, I know these people, but there’s a reason why I’m not friends with them. Facebook is just Myspace without the glitter, and I like glitter. Eventually though, you realise that there’s no one left on Myspace except you, Tom, and a whole lot of music.

My phone is a piece of shite (not literally). It doesn’t have Bluetooth, it doesn’t have video, the memory isn’t big enough to hold an entire ringtone... the list goes on. So why did I buy it? Well, it’s pink.
The main way it makes my daily life hell is the dictionary. Many a text message has been typed out one letter at a time because it has never heard of 9 out of every 10 words in the English language, and you can’t save new ones in there (eg. it offers you six other combinations of letters before it offers you the word 'poo'). It’s hard to navigate someone through Melbourne when the corner of Flinders and Swanston has become the corner of 'Elimddpp and Swamptm6 .'
I used to work in Hawthorn. This phone doesn’t know Hawthorn, it only knows 'Gaythorn.' And that’s the story of the time I laughed so hard at work that I almost wet my pants.

I realise I’ve been slagging off technology for a while now, so I’d like to point out some of the good points. For starters, self checkout units have made shoplifting effortless.* Then there’s our little friend Twitter. Ah, Twitter. When my parents were my age, and they were on the train, they had to write to all of their friends to let them know. That process was both expensive and time consuming, not to mention extremely wasteful. And by the time you got to the postbox to send them, you weren’t on the train anymore, rendering the entire exercise pointless.

How did people ever survive?

*I've never shoplifted. For reals, I haven't.