Me Vs Me: The Adventures Of A Luddite

The refrain of 'If this is the future, where's my jetpack?' has been knocking around for a fair old while now but based on my customary approach to things, if we had jetpacks available to us, I probably wouldn't use one.

At least not until all the early adopters worked out the bugs - their recognition for these contributions possibly accorded posthumously - and it became absolutely necessary.

I'm basing this assumption on the fact that a button has recently fallen off my mobile phone, forcefully reminding me that I need to buy a new one, and the amount of trouble I'm having deciding on what sort of phone to get does not bode well for my adopting any other forms of technology without putting up a fight.

I've mentioned before that I'm a bit technologically disadvantaged, a bit reluctant to take up certain things, and this definitely applies to the way I think about phones.

It's the cynical, old-before-my-time part of my personality that drives this, viciously gumming a butterscotch as it mutters under its breath that phones are for phone calls and if I wanted to take a photo or access the internet I'd use a dang camera or a gosh-dang laptop computer.

The part of me that wants to try new things is valiantly struggling against this argument, a little more strongly than it used to in the past.

If we get a touch-screen phone, it whispers, we'll be a step closer to having a computer book like Penny. I know I said your laptop was like that but isn't a phone better?

We'd be like Ford Prefect, scrolling through The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy and checking out the entry on Eccentrica Gallumbits, The Triple-Breasted Whore of Eroticon 6!

I'd been having some luck talking myself around to this way of thinking until some friends responded to my remarks about my broken button meaning I needed to get a new phone by commenting that the fact that my phone had buttons at all was the reason I needed to get a new phone.

This is a terrible approach to getting me to try new things.

I react to it in much the same way I did as a teenager to comments like 'Well, look who's finally up!'

I turn around and get back into bed.

In this scenario, bed is a metaphor for old phones.

That sulky part of me would rather like to track down one of my favourite handsets - the Nokia 6085 - and just stick with that for another few years.


It made me feel like I was a Star Fleet officer.

I think I'm going to be able to overcome my hesitant, grumpy self and take a step into the future* to join everybody else, but I'm approaching it slowly so as not to startle myself.

The only thing I can say for sure is that it won't be an iPhone, for no better reason than I can't stand the way that people go on about them.

This may be as irrational as saying I'm not going to try penicillin because of the way everybody keeps knobbing on about it but it's an aversion that's pretty well cemented in.

Now I just have to find a viable alternative, get used to the idea and then hold my nerve all the way up to the register!



*Or even the present would be a good start!