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Friday 20th 32F, cold but calm and clear. Sunshine threatened.
It was a bit chilly on my hands as I headed for the lanes in bright sunshine. Only a few gulls were present. Traffic about normal.
There was a story in the Danish news about a person being denied access to a bus because he wanted to pay cash for his ticket to ride. He was elderly, perhaps in his 60s and the driver admitted the man had difficulty walking. His crime for immediate expulsion from the bus? Not having a mobile phone with a payment app.
Bozo keeps demanding I "tap the link"on my smart phone to confirm my identity. But I don't have a touch screen and "they" don't do emails.
Technology blindness is a remarkably frequent problem for [we] the elderly. I have found myself wanting in the same upgrade department: I'd go to collect a parcel from the "parcel centre." Where the pre-pubescent, supermarket, checkout operator is filling in as part time postmaster/mistress. They cannot manage the apparently simple communications tasks involved unless I have a "SMART" phone with me. I have even been sent away empty-handed by one of these 9 year-olds after a cycle ride in the rain.
Owning an ancient Nokia "mobile" phone [normally used only for direct comms with my wife on the home landline] is insufficient to cope with modern technology. Nokia "dumb" phones cannot exchange emails for a start. The elderly bod is left feeling inadequate and frustrated because the young zombie providing "the service" assumes that literally everybody [still breathing] is permanently welded at the breastbone to a smart phone.
On one occasion I was handed the ungainly device with which they communicated with the parcel service. Could I send them a quick SMS with my details and mail address? Could I what? I had never knowingly sent an SMS. Though, of course, I do know what they are.
The same applies to the kind people who do the home shopping service for the vulnerable during the Jinping Plague. The pocket change they receive for this service hardly covers their costs. But I digress.
I write clearly on our printed order at the supermarket's shopping website that I want: ABSOLUTELY NO SUBSTITUTES: [In Danish.] Yet these same shoppers still feel bound to ask: [Just in case potential malnutrition is looming in the event of their abject failure to supply.] Do I want X if Y is not available?
Which, of course, they do by SMS. How am I to usefully respond? They do not reply to my phone call. Probably because we aren't publicly listed and who answers a hidden number? I may have still two opposed thumbs but I missed the Thursday afternoon lesson [in infant school] learning to type onto a "Smart" phone with them. Last week I learned how to type "ok" and even managed to send it via Nokia dumb phone. At the fifth attempt! I kid you not!
BTW: I won't hear a word said against my Nokia phone. Apart from the screen being too small to read without my folding, magnifying glass. From memory it cost me £7 in a supermarket. It has never failed. The battery survives into its second decade and receptions seems universal. Even when my wife calls me in the middle of the forest in case I have gone [inadvertently] paddling in a very deep puddle. Or the wolves have eaten me for breakfast. The terrifying "wolf" sounds later proved to be noisy deer.
I do count myself amongst the "technology assisted" by any standards of a moderately mobile septuagenarian. I have been blogging for years. Even surviving the collapse of Orange free blogger. I've been posting videos to YT for well over a decade. [Not that anybody ever watches them, but still, you get the point] I cut my teeth on a Sinclair ZX81 and later BBC B when B&W portable CRT TVs were the norm for "computer monitors".
I worked on the periphery of computers the size of sports halls in my youth. That was back in the last century and nobody alive remembers punched cards or punched paper tape. [Except me.]
I must be on my 5th flat screen by now. CRT is dead. Analogue TV is dead. FM radio is dead. You need Arecibo to receive the BBC by satellite from Denmark. BBC has now broken Arecibo to stop dual license holders from watching what they have legally paid for? Bloody dictatorships!
I can easily handle a smart camera including video in slo-mo. Or run my observatory. Aided by multiple softwares and stuffed with assorted boxes of electronic tricks. So why should I learn to type and send SMSs for that, possibly once a year. Slight off-chance of communication from another human, more gifted with their opposed digits? Thumb typing will be out of date by Wednesday of next week. You'll have to blink your retinas at 100MHz towards a holographic screen or something.
Let's be brutally honest: I am, by definition and by the highest authority, a fully paid up and approved, old fart. So, by default, I am excused SMSs and "smart" phones on the grounds of having nobody with whom to exchange said forms of communication. Can somebody please put the word around that I am not alone. There are countless millions more of us out there. All of whom suffer from the lack of being "digitally upgraded." i.e. "Un-smart."
First they got rid of bus conductors. Then the steam locomotives. Then it was natural gas. Then metric money. Then coloured TV. Then digital calculators and watches. I was an early adopter of all sorts of long forgotten detritus and mouldering landfill. It is so long since we went to The Moon that nobody believes it was real.
Vinyl, tapes or cassettes? Vinyl, Tapes or CDs? Vinyl, tapes or DVDs? Windows or IOS? GPS. Hacking "smart" fridges which don't work in cold rooms? Wireless, Blue Tooth, Telepathy? The phone boxes are gone! Now they talk to creepy Bozo's loudspeaker which answers back! Android TV and tablets, or what?
Windows is no longer Pick'n'miXP. USB, USB2 and USB3 A,B,C &D1 2 or 3? Mini, micro and HDMI and all its offspring. Now they change the mobile phone standards every other week. So the numpties burn down the damned masts! Phones are deliberately "bricked" by the makers to improve turnover of new models. They screw with the test software for MOTs! Elon Tesla rules the world and outer space?
Where will it all end? I know, let's cut out the middle man and "chip me" now! Just in case I get lost on the way back from the empty lanes. There'll be nobody to ask the way and I can't possibly SMS for help. By the time General AI arrives I shall be well beyond its grudging aid! When the time comes. will they bury me, burn me or Beam me up!
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