The mobile phone: my closest friend

Literally. I take him everywhere I go because I feel vulnerable without him. He sleeps beside me, wakes me up, tells me that it’s raining outside. During the day, he sits squarely in my pocket. Perhaps you have a similar friend?

Every now and then I teach him a new skill. He learns it in seconds, kind of like how Trinity in The Matrix learnt how to fly a helicopter. Only, unlike Trinity who’s human and will grow old and stop learning things, this companion of mine will continue to learn until the day his heart stops beating - or battery stops charging. 

But I can’t teach him everything;  this one has a limited knowledge capacity. Nonetheless, he’s sturdy, cheap to run, fast. You might as well say that he’s… no; he isn’t perfect. He gets close.

When I introduce him to friends, I say he’s this super nice internet-connected gizmo who does amazing things. The downside is that he occasionally buzzes and wants me to talk to someone. I’m not fond of those moments. Not fond at all.

We’ll be hanging out, he and I – writing things, reading other things, playing games – when all of a sudden: Vvvvrrrrnnngggggg! The name of a person I probably know interrupts my aloneness, and my friend here sings a song – loudly – to break the silence. It’s a song I’ve grown sick of. In fact, I’ve grown sick of every one of his songs.

I get it, he’s warning me – like your dog yapping to warn you that someone’s on your property. And that someone will keep coming back unless you deal with him now. It’s a universal truth that it’s better to deal with him now. But as that damnable song screeches through the pores of that tinny speaker, I’m less inclined to appease it and more inclined to question why I live in a society that insists on answering - answering doors, answering questions, answering phones - and why I have a problem with it. Actually, why do I keep a device whose fundamental purpose is to make answering stuff easier? Why would I do that to myself?

I’m an introvert; I choose my friends carefully. But this friend – this closest friend – isn’t so good at discriminating. He sings for everyone. Every single one. If only I could live without him.

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"It's not instant enough!"

Snappy and passion-filled, these were the words of a friend speaking on the subject of reheating food in the oven as opposed to the microwave.

The oven, I'd argued, retains the crispiness of a pizza base or the stability of a pie pastry - and we all know that a pie's pastry is make-or-break, literally. I said if we didn't have to contend with time, the oven would win.

But she was quick to remind me that we are always contending with time, and so, whenever we juxtapose the quick-start blitzer with the oven's knobs, fan-force and backlight, most of us will simply give shrug to the latter and declare, "It's not instant enough."

Little did I know then, but she had it right. In another time I was content with waiting for my dial-up internet connection to load my Neopets profile or that Homestar Runner episode, even though the latter's audio would run ahead of the video by dint of, you know, the dial-up. Things like this were far from instant, but they were more than enough.

In another time, there was this thing called 'patience'; and even when it came to technology - even when a web page would load in its stop-motion-style unveiling as each bit by literal bit of content appeared onscreen - I remained content.

Now, jump forward to last week: I did not remain content. There was an internet outage - or rather, an internet hissy fit - and it just wouldn't sit still. I tell you, the web of 2014 was as sporadic as a flickering dim light swinging on a cord in a horror film, and had this fit lasted any longer than it did, I would've had a case of hissy to call my own.

See, I'd been promised broadband with download speeds that made one's face alight. But on that day, during that bout of internet indecision, it was more akin to dial-up, albeit without the electronic scratching noises that many of us can play by ear. This wasn't right, I said. This wasn't instant enough!

Even when the connection appeared to have fixed itself, web pages would load in a jittery slowness. It was like coming early to the airport, expecting it to be empty, and finding an impossibly long queue leaking into the foyer because everyone else had had the same idea. It was the bane of the first world, and I was its unsuspecting victim.

But yet, in this moment of strife was an afterimage of reminiscence. I recalled my old dragon from Neopets - now starving to death from a lack of sausage omelette - and asked him, "At what point did this all start to change?"

Coffee will never be instant enough. Not ever.

Technology is meant to help, not hinder; it's the magic of the modern world; it's there to astound and to surprise us on a planet which grows increasingly destitute of wonder. And indeed, it does astound - once. But following that, it becomes common place - so much so that even wonder itself may soon wither into novelty.

Somehow, over the last two decades, our expectations have become so inflated that they now coincide with basic rights. Our soons have been superimposed onto nows, and our needs and wants have become so interlaced as to remove all difference. The time bracket has become our worst enemy, and technology's best selling point. Wonders are no longer appreciated but expected.

However means through which this change has occurred, it's been slow and insidious, a usurper who for years we never knew was king. And if we are the masters of ourselves, then we have only ourselves to blame. Ironic, isn't it, that in many ways my twelve year-old self was more mature than I am now at twenty-five? A small part of me knows that this isn't how life is meant to work.

We are mammals; we adapt; and we adapt far faster than it does us good. We rip the extraordinary into its constituents, but the re-assemblage thereafter is a chore that takes too long. A web page used to take thirty seconds to load; now, if it asks for more than three, my instinct is to hit refresh repeatedly and with increasing violence, rather than give it the time of day.

You can sit on a seat thirty thousand feet in the air and travel at over 900kph, and that was wondrous, too, once. Now, along with the cramped seating and the lacklustre movies, human flight is an age-worn oven. It's not instant enough.

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My smartphone is a culmination of first world problems

I swear that my phone hates me. I've come to believe that it's teeming with thousands of tiny first-world nanomites that refuse to vacate their nest whenever I'm forced to open my phone and fiddle with the battery.

I try to console myself. Think realistically. Be grateful. I mean, none of us is free from the gripes and annoyances that make our lives slightly less convenient. For some it's that dishwasher that doesn't dry the dishes properly; for others it's the unreachable in-flight magazine in Business Class. (You have to get up from your seat and walk three steps in order to attain it). But things could always be worse. A lot worse. I mean, you could---
POOF!
Sorry, that was the sound of my reverie snapping, because my phone decided to die. See what I mean?

My 19-months-old LG-P970 Android and I have had our moments. There was that one time when the battery lasted a whole day, and that other time when my message sent. But I've come to expect none of that any more, largely based on the fact that it fails.

1. About once a fortnight my phone turns itself off -- annoying if I'm sleeping and have to, you know, wake up.

2. About one in every four texts doesn't send. When that happens, my phone notifies me, to which I think, "Oh, a super fast reply!" Then I read it. "Message not sent." RAGE!

3. In about 29 days of every month my phone functions incredibly slowly.

4. My phone battery dies in about nine hours. You can almost watch the green meter whittle away.

5. The headphone receptacle no longer clips the jack properly. So, when I go for a run, the plug pops out after the fifth step, and I lose all motivation to exercise.

6. My phone freezes at the same frequency that it turns itself off.

7. Of all the apps that crash, the home screen crashes the most. HOW DOES THAT EVEN MAKE SENSE!? 

8. When someone calls me, my phone takes until the fourth ring to display the answer and decline options. And then how I answer is itself a mini-game. It might be that all I'll need to do is touch the green 'answer' button. But the next time someone calls, I'll instead have to drag the button from right to left. And even then my phone tends to amp up the difficulty by LAGGING. So by the time that it registers my commands, the caller has already reached my voicemail. DOUBLE RAGE!

9. Apps open by themselves minutes after I close them.

10. Sometimes, when I want to text, say, Nicole, I'll select her name, but my phone will take me to Hamish instead! Since I won't think to check the name at the top of the the screen, it's only when Hamish replies, "Huh?" that I realise I've texted the wrong person. You can imagine the potential for awkward here.

Well, how do I do it? I hear you ask. Believe it or not, there are worse first world problems than a headache-inducing phone. I've considered buying a new phone, which would eliminate this mass inconvenience; but then that would only create the issue known as having no money. And having no money could easily become a genuine problem. So, you know---
POOF!
Oh look, there it goes again.

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