How technology has eased the path

In this information-ready era, there are so many things that our children will never have to face, that we did.

1. Mum not having a clue how to do a French braid. There's Youtube. And now she's watched the French braid video, you can browse together the many other complicated braiding possibilities. Many!
2. Going to the public library to get a book out on a topic for a project at school, only to find that there were two relevant books, and guess what? They've both been taken out by other children. Because there were two books and thirty children. 
3. Not knowing what a rude word means. Not finding it in the dictionary. Being too embarrassed to ask your Mum or a friend. That's what Google is for. It might not even be a rude word. Just a super-cool one. Urban Dictionary will tell you.
4. Not getting a joke. Why is everyone laughing, and you didn't understand it? Again, Google.
5. Sitting in a cafe on your own. Whether it was filling in time, or waiting for a late friend, there used to be an exquisite awkwardness about being on your own in a cafe. Do you nip out and buy a newspaper to read? Or do you carry a paperback in your handbag, for just such moments as this? Do you fiddle endlessly with your coffee? Do you go to the loo - again - to fill in a few minutes? This next generation will never have to worry. They have their phones.
6. The indecision as to whether to buy a Filofax or not. Filofaxes polarised us. They were either the ultimate cool, showing that you had lots of friends - in fact, so many of them that you had to spend serious money on a leather-bound book to keep all their details in. Or they were just too cliche for words, and you stuck with your old address book, which had a picture of Salisbury Cathedral on the front. There was no half-measure. Either you were a Filofax person, or you weren't. But whichever you were, you were expected to show great sympathy when you heard the story of someone's friend or sister who had lost their Filofax, or had it stolen. All those friends' details stored carefully between the leather covers, gone! I suppose that is one thing that has been carried forward into the technological era, and intensified. The lost phone. That must be much worse than the lost Filofax.
7. Endless conversations devoted to giving directions. How did we manage before mobile phones? 
8. The need to be punctual. If you couldn't contact the person you were meeting, then being 5 or maybe 10 minutes late was ok, but you wouldn't expect them to be happy for longer than that (see 5 above). No mobile phones meant no potential for last-minute apologies, or re-arranging of venue to fit in with your inefficient travel plans. Maybe this one is a loss rather than a gain of modern life.

Can you think of any others?

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Textpat Mum

Still on my blogging break, but just had to share this story with you.

The way technology makes decisions for you annoys me. For example, I can't drive my car unless I am wearing the seat belt. This is annoying if I've parked, undone the seat belt, and then decide I'd like to edge forward another inch or two. The car just won't move, unless I buckle up again.

Another example: my phone automatically uploaded all my google contacts, even though I never asked it to. This is rubbish, because it means that I have a large number of contacts, whereas I only use the phone for calls and texts to people in my immediate life. (No, I'm not boasting about that number of contacts; it's just that the phone has uploaded anyone, everyone, who's ever sent me an email to which I've replied - or that's what it seems like).

Thus it was, dear Bloggy Friends, that one of my Bloggy Friends who lives in Chicago received a short burst of texts from me today:

"How about john n natasha? freya in poppy's class"

"McNabs? two daughters and know the andersons. u like peter who talks to u after chapel. wrights? john and roger wld get on"

"So how about smithsons collingwoods andersons and wrights?"

Poor Expat Mum was a little confused, until the final one shed just a little light:

"cld u find out when guest night is and if too late to take 6 or 8 places"

and she realised that it was me, trying to text my husband, whose name (without giving away any anonymity here) might mean that he is next to her in my contacts list.

Oh, and while we're on the subject of annoying technology, what about spell-checkers? In an email chat with another Bloggy Friend this afternoon, I was amused when she told me that having her sons at different schools worked out ok, "but it's a piano when it comes to pickup".

OMT!!

Here is a random list of things that have changed in Britain in the five and a half years since we moved away.

It was 12-06 when we left. It was 06-12 when we returned. That makes it easy to remember for filling in forms. And it's tidy. I like life to be tidy. It so often isn't, that when there are little tidy things like this, it makes me happy.

Pharmacists can now dispense a decent level of medication. Yay. This makes total sense. It was being talked about when we left, I seem to remember, but now it's really happened. So I went and got some antibiotic eye drops for conjunctivitis, without having to prostrate myself in front of a doctor's receptionist, begging abjectly for an appointment. I just needed a few prompts from the pharmacist, who was helpful enough to give them to me. "Not sticky? Just red and itchy? Are you sure not sticky? How about first thing in the morning, when you wake up? A bit sticky then, perhaps? Yes..? Ah, it's sticky. It's just that that's one of the symptoms I have to hear." I love it when people beat the system.

A first class postage stamp is now 60p. What? Don't be expecting any birthday cards from me any more. If Amazon can deliver large, heavy packages for free, why does the Royal Mail need 60p to deliver a small, light card? They ought to be paying us, actually, for feeding those red boxes and keeping them in business. Just before we left, the Royal Mail changed the way they charge for packages. Instead of the simple weighing of a parcel, they'd introduced a system which required the counter staff to weigh it, measure it, see if it would fit through a slot, balance it on their head, do a cartwheel with it between their knees, and spin in on a 50p piece. It seemed a little over-burdensome to me. I hate to say "see, I told you so", but here we are, with a first class stamp at 60p. I only remains for me to make a joke about the Royal Mail and the front page of the Sun. Consider it made.

There are an awful lot of tv channels - more than you can shake a tv remote at. Perhaps there were in 12-06 and we just didn't subscribe to them. We weren't missing much. There are the five old favourites, and then several hundred others, which repeat what was on the five old faves, either a few hours later, or a few years later. I shouldn't complain really. It's quite useful for us. If we want to watch today's tv, we can. If we want to pretend we're in a time warp and have never been away at all, we can do that too.

Smartphones. They're rather good, aren't they? Husband and I have each got one. We didn't plan to, and the very thought of us owning one each had our children smirking and giggling. They felt rather protective of us, and wanted to come shopping with us, to help us sort out our phone needs. I think they worried that we'd be sold a tv remote at smartphone price, and come home proudly brandishing it, not realising we'd been ripped off. Oh they of little faith! In fact, we went to Tesco, got a fabulous deal, and came home rejoicing that there is at least one thing that is seriously cheaper in Britain than it is in America. Come to think of it, why isn't there an app that allows you to change channels on the tv with your smartphone? That would save you the enormous effort of having to put it down on the coffee table, and pick up the remote, and then do the same manoeuvre in reverse. You could save seconds. Valuable seconds. This is the 21st century. It does rather worry me, though, that the country is being run by Tesco, not the government. Which one, honestly, has more influence over our daily lives?

My waist. I used to have one. I definitely did. I remember it well. I don't now. It must be to do with climate change and air pressure, or something like that. Very odd.

There's one thing that hasn't changed. For this, I join the many-voiced chorus of Americans who have lived in, or even just visited, Britain. Oh, Mixer Taps!! Why don't we have them over here? How hard could that be? I can't tell you how backward it feels to have temperature discrimination in our taps, when you have been used to the unsegregated flow of a simple mixer tap.  O... M... T...!!

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Cell buy date

I went shopping last night with 12-yo and bought him a cell phone (mobile phone) for Christmas. It’s been one of those issues over which I’ve felt such a parent. You know the kind of thing. He just wants one, wants one, wants one, and Husband and I are thinking “he only wants one because his friends all have one, he’ll probably lose it at school, what is he going to DO with it for heaven’s sake? why will he need to text his friends when he’s going to see them the next morning and what can they possibly have to say to each other anyway? and they’re so expensive, is he really going to want to spend ALL his pocket money on phone calls? Is he going to have enough money, or are WE going to pay for them?” I tried fishing back into my childhood, to find something equivalent, to try and remember what it felt like to be 12 years old and wanting something so badly, but I drew a blank. Maybe it was a different era.

Getting your first cell phone is something of a rite of passage. These days, young men can't really head out with their spears to kill their first animal, and I suppose it is fitting that in a society dominated by consumerism and technology, the purchase of a cell phone has come to represent a significant moment on the journey to adulthood. 12-yo had done his research: Verizon, T-mobile, AT&T. He’d collected leaflets, printed out pages from websites, compared tariffs. He persuaded me that AT&T was the best, because the two friends who he’ll be calling most have AT&T, and so he would get free calls to them. Conclusive argument, I had to agree.

It’s a bit like buying what 13 years ago was called a 'pram' or a 'pushchair', in the days when a 'travel system' was the Chicago El or the London Underground. The shop assistant said to you “what you need depends on your lifestyle”, and you were thinking “I don’t KNOW what my lifestyle is going to be like when I have a baby”. In the same way, the very helpful AT&T man was describing the 8,000 different plans to choose between, and was saying “what you need depends on how you’re going to use the phone”, and I was thinking “he doesn’t KNOW how he’s going to use the phone”.

We ended up with a compromise. I didn’t buy him the $300 (on special offer at $200) touch screen latest model, which is flying off the shelves so fast that I was going to have to leave my name and number and he was going to contact me the moment the next consignment came in. But I also didn’t buy him the $30 clunky model that makes even my aged phone look impressive. There was a fortunate half-way house that just happened to be on special offer (was it really, or do the sales assistants have the flexibility to invent a story at the last minute when the sniff of a sale is getting stronger?) It was a phone with a keyboard – which 12-yo assured me was vital, though I couldn’t really see how anyone except an elf would have small enough fingers to use it. The usual price was $100, but I paid $80, and $50 of that was given as credit to 12-yo for calls, bringing the ‘real’ price down to the same as the clunky $30. So everyone was happy. The sales assistant made a sale, 12-yo got a phone and $50 to spend on calls and texts, and I came away feeling I'd managed to avoid paying a complete fortune whilst also avoiding being as hopelessly luddite as I'm sure my son feared I would be.

In the middle of the purchase, 12-yo was looking at the phone and asked “how do you get to use the camera?” and I cringed inside and steeled myself, for I knew that the phone didn’t have a camera, and that being told so would be both a disappointment and a humiliation. I wanted to whisk him out of the store in the blink of an eye, explain the no-camera situation, and then run back in, and say to the assistant “let’s just rewind 45 seconds and pretend he didn’t ask that question, shall we?” But as I was cringing and steeling, a most strange thing happened. The assistant was taking the phone in his own hand and saying “you go down to Tools on this menu, and press OK, and then see, it says Camera, so you press OK, and there you are… Good to go”. Sometimes not being omniscient has its upside.

As we left, 12-you said to me “you were looking a bit sad in there. Were you ok? Or were you just thinking how I’m growing up?” I’m glad he displays such pinpoint precision in locating maternal feelings, because pinpoint precision is what he's going to need when it comes to the elf keyboard. I assured him that yes, I was thinking about how he’s growing up, but that no, I wasn’t sad. And I really wasn’t. It’s just the next thing.

So far, he has two contacts in his phone. Mum (“Shall I call you Mum or Iota?” “Call me Mum, I think”) and Tiny, the AT&T sales assistant (“if you’re having any problems, you can just text me and I’ll try and help”). And here’s the difference. I am Mum. It’s my name for 3 people in this world, and it’s also what I am. Whereas Tiny…

Yesterday was a big day for 12-yo. He also had an eye test that revealed what he suspected, ie that he needs glasses (it’s in the genes, poor kid had no chance). So tonight we’re going to go and choose frames. Phones and frames. It’s all happening at once. I can’t keep up.

And here’s one more little Mum moment. What 12-yo doesn’t remember, or maybe never knew, is that before the other two came along, I used to sign off missives to family “A,T&T”, because at that time, that’s who we were (Iota’s not my real name, you know). So secretly, I’m quite pleased he’s with them, though come to think of it, T-mobile would be very appropriate too.

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