My recent rant about mobile phones and privacy got me thinking about all the technology that infests our lives and how much of it is actually useful. Case in point, the electronic key fob that lets me into my house. These days, instead of inserting a key, which has been a perfectly acceptable method of entering buildings for… oooh… 4,000 years or so, I now have to stroke my front door with a peice of plastic to get in.

 Two points. Number one: every man gets lonely but I don’t like my front door that much. Number two: it doesn’t bloody work. Most nights I stumble home from the pub only to stand before my house waving my hands like an orchestra conductor and weeping with vexation because the damn thing refuses to open. Even if it did work, it has no advantages over a key. It’s no smaller, no faster, and it’s not like keys have ever being particularly difficult to use. Except for Bayon, of course, for whom a key is like carrying around a surfboard.

But, here’s the worry. Once you start doubting the technology in your life, it becomes very difficult to stop.

You see after leaving my house this morning, the first thing I did was to plug in my headphones where they’ll probably remain for a majority of the day. I listen to music on the way to work, when I need to concentrate in work, when I go the gym, go on long journeys… You get the picture, and I suspect most people are the same. My MP3 player is great, but I do worry that we’re increasingly using our technology as an excuse to bundle ourselves up against the world, ears blocked with headphones, eyes blocked by laptops. When was the last time we looked at a stranger on the bus, let alone talked to them?

Then there’s Tesco, which has recently been invaded by the self-service machine. What an incredibly aggravating device this is. Instead of handing your sandwich over to a till person, you now swipe it yourself and bag it yourself, an action which is promptly followed by it telling you it doesn’t recognise what you’ve swiped and doesn’t believe it’s in the bag. I swear, using these things is about as much fun as rubbing your bum over sandpaper, and I’ve yet to use one without it locking up and calling a till person anyway. I’ve never gotten one of these things to work, and thanks to the sheer amount of hassle they cause, the queues they’re meant to reduce are now out of the door. Thank you for shopping with Tesco it chirps. No, no Tesco, thank you for completely wasting the last ten minutes of my life. 

Next up is an electronic swipe card to get into work, which I always lose, a lift which can’t count and will invariably skip whichever floor you’re on, and a possessed work computer which couldn’t be anymore evil if it hovered five feet off the desk and threw up on me every time I started it. There’s my phone which dials 999 every time I sit down, my laptop which makes a noise akin to nails down a chalkboard when I turn it on, and every single peice of software I use on a daily basis which invariably turns a five minute task into a fifteen minute chore.

In fact, as I bring this rant to a close just about the only piece of technological bobbins which makes my everyday a parade is the microwave. Two thirds of everything I eat has probably been irridiated by that baby, and I make no apologies for that because I hate cooking, don’t understand fine cuisine and have no truck with healthy food.