When the phone battery starts to die a little faster you know it's getting to that time where you have to face a telco shop. I can't say I've ever had a good experience in one of these. They have a way of making you feel really old and dumb. They speak at you and ask you questions that you can't answer because you don't recognise the language. It sounds like our own language but you don't recognise any of the words. They then stand there looking annoyed with you but satisfied that you are about to part with a regular commitment to a very large sum of money for something that you don't completely understand. I don't really want much from my technology. I'm ok with the basics. I don't have many apps because I don't want to hand over more dosh, remember more effing passwords and because they are something that I don't know exist I basically don't miss out on having them. I don't need my phone to unlock my front door, turn on my household lights, start my car or drive it for that matter. I would like it to sweep the kitchen floor but that's not about to happen any day. My generation and older are seen as incompetents when it comes to the latest technology and whilst I'm perfectly fine with that I'm not fine with the fact that they use it to suck money out of your account on a monthly basis. Something younger generations don't seem to mind. Whilst my generation invented the technology, we often get wrongly assumed as not being able to adjust to the changes. What rubbish. The amount of technological changes someone in their fifties has had to live with is mind blowing. We were employed as data entry operators on some of the largest and most basic of computer operating systems. The hard drive was the size of your washing machine and changing the tape drives involved heavy lifting. Word processing required us to memorise every single short cut and function operation with no look up or data intelligence. We were the ones that had to be intelligent. The early word processing machines had a display screen of one line only. You typed letter by letter across the screen and then when the maximum got to end of the display it disappeared until you printed it out and hoped for the best. Or went back line by line. The end result of this and the type writer was that the more accurate you were, the less time you spent repeating the same piece of work. Then when the intelligence came through technology, it made it easier. And the technology got smarter and smarter. It became intuitive, collected data and memorised our patterns of behaviours. Now it wants the keys to your car. Is anybody worried about this or is it me?
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