What Technology Should Be For

The obvious drawback to highly advanced digital technology is that it often can’t be bothered to work. The more arcane drawback to it is that its principles, disappointingly, can’t be exported into real life.

How many of us, having said something crashingly tactless, or twatty, have searched in vain for the back button? How many of us, on the twentieth back-breaking press-up, have moaned to just cut and paste the last five?

And if only daily conversation worked like the shuffle does on an iPod. You’d never know what conversation you were getting – it’d be satisfyingly random. You might pop into the newsagents, ask for a copy of ‘The Daily Quark’ and perhaps a bar of tasty ‘Caramac’ – and instead be treated to a short verbal treatise on, ooooh I dunno, The Glorious Revolution of 1688. In meetings, when it came to the Ops Report, instead the ‘conversation shuffle’ might throw up a debate about ‘Photography – is it an art, or isn’t it? And either way, are my holiday snaps ready yet?'

After all, most of us seem fated to have the same conversation over and over again throughout our lives – or, at best, the same few conversations. ‘What is the point of this job?’ and ‘Why do I support this team again?’ and ‘You’re definitely sure this will support my weight?’ We need, my friends, the ‘conversation shuffle’, and I’d be grateful if one of you could invent it.

That said, I was sitting on a tube train last Wednesday when a complete stranger turned to me and tried to start a conversation about The Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Naturally, I told him to f*** off, the pointless freak.