There is definitely a lot
I like about modern life: the immediacy
that ensures wants and wishes are satisfied for instance and the relative ease
with which a taxi can be called to the door.
No more regular episodes of trawling through the yellow pages, or
queuing up at Tom’s Happy Pizzas because all fast food can be ordered to arrive
at your convenience. What’s more instead
of telephone calls costing painful pounds per minute, a two hour block to your
best friend in the Orkneys can take place every weekend if you so wish for
simple sums that represent a four year old’s pocket money. I like
on line banking and the ease of using Eftpos cards especially those you simply
have to wave in the general direction of the machine. Magic!
I’m a fan of being able to order books on my Kindle and have them
available to read within minutes (even though on balance I still prefer proper
books with paper pages to turn).
Yes, modern life is a
great improvement on those years growing up in York Road, Northfleet even
though there was something to be said for joining the queue for Fish &
Chips in Shepherd Street on a Friday, especially in late autumn when on the way
home, clutching the hot newspaper bundle the temperature had dropped another
degree and your breath formed small grey clouds ahead of you. True it was highly inconvenient to have to wait
at the red telephone box on The Hill for Jacqueline Haskell to complete the
call to her boyfriend at the Sea School but to be fair it didn’t affect me too
much as I didn’t really know anyone with a telephone that I could call in the
first place.
Modern life can be
delightfully stress free, or it should be and probably is for many of us. What I despise and detest about this brave
newish century is Passwords. Yes
Passwords, those codes that grow ever more intricate that you must at all costs
remember because without them you might well find yourself quite unable to
accomplish any of the above listed delights and the joys of online banking will
become a dim memory not to mention the bliss of ordering the new volume on the
life of Pepys that was just reviewed on radio.
In fact it is highly likely you will never be in a position to listen to
radio again because unless you still have one of those old fashioned ones
tucked away, those operated via battery, electricity or steam, you will be
quite unable to access the programming.
To think that all those
years ago (1931) Aldous Huxley predicted the massive societal and technological
shift that brought us to the frontiers of this brave new world where we seem to
have become dehumanised and disoriented and yet delightfully happy to be the
owners of mobile phones via which we can text those we know, and others we don’t
know, in an instant. Although Huxley does not specifically mention Passwords in
the book, I feel free to lay some of the blame for them at his feet because he
was in many ways simply asking for trouble by writing the wretched novel in the
first place.
Passwords are all very
well as long as you remember them but that of course is easier said than done
considering that you must under no circumstances write them down and you must
never use the same one more than once.
I might even have had a reasonable chance of success with these
restrictive password parameters thirty years ago but I don’t have a dog’s
chance now. And it’s all very well
reminding myself that in the final analysis I can always pretend I have
Forgotten the Password and simply apply to make a change because I can assure
you that does not always work as I found out to my cost this very morning.
The lovely Samsung
people, out there in the ether, those who are in total control of my account
and forgive me the trespass of Password forgetfulness, like Huxley’s world
government want me to be happy. They
want my Password to be restored despite the lie of forgetting it. They probably know I didn’t really forget it
because I had actually written it down hadn’t I which is an even worse trespass. Nevertheless they are more than willing to give
me a chance and allow me to change it, they send me a code which I must not
share with anyone. I obeyed them and
didn’t share – there was nobody around to share with. I know
I got the code right – I wrote it down and when I entered it, it actually
worked! Success!!! I am all at once ecstatic. My cup runneth over! But not for long.
Minutes later when I
confidently returned to the Apps store to access the Sky TV Guide I am told
that my account is unauthorised. And
that is when I realised that I must never, ever write down Passwords again or
use the same one too frequently because the modern day equivalent of Huxley’s chilling
world government, controlling every aspect of our lives will surely KNOW when I
do and their wrath will assuredly descend upon me.
In essence I have not
really moved very far from that dire childhood situation when I suddenly realised
that God KNEW every time I lied, each time I spent my Brownies sub on bubble
gum and every time I cheated at long division and copied Pearl Banfield’s
answers. But to give Him His due, at
least He did not add into the mysterious mix of Catholicism the terrifying
possibility of becoming ensnared along the way and toppled into Password
Purgatory.
