Wearing Out ... or Just Changing?

It's amazing what can come out of a conversation that, only an hour before it happened, I wouldn't have dreamed could have taken place at all.  It's not my habit to chat at all to 19-year-old men, let alone in such a relaxed and informal way.

It all started when my phone began to play up when transferring pictures to my computer some months ago.  I could plug in the lead connecting the two devices, but the one wouldn't recognise the other, so no transfer was possible.  I would unplug it, then plug it in again and be successful.  Gradually this phenomenon became more regular, and a second attempt would be followed by a third, and so on.  On Tuesday this week, when I wanted to transfer something really important, five attempts - and a wasted half-hour I could ill afford - were required.

As I dealt with the important material once it had been transferred, I resolved that the time had come to change the phone, an idea I had toyed with for several months, but constantly deferred.  Once the job was completed, I made my way to the phone shop.  Here I was asked - as I had expected - many questions about usage and phone habits to which I couldn't provide adequate answers.  In order to further the discussion more swiftly, the assistant gently held out his hand for the phone and asked "may I?"  I was only too glad to let someone who knew what he was talking about take over.

He began rapidly clicking the keys, and commented, "Gosh, I haven't heard that sound for a long while."  The phone is only five years old but in that time not only has technology moved on apace, but also the means of its delivery!  By way of illustrating the fact that I understood his surprise, I spoke of my amazement when working briefly at an office in the USA in 2000, to find that the internet was constantly 'live' on the computer.  Back home at that time, when you opened your browser (Did we use that term then?  I really can't remember!) you could hear the dial-up modem whirring its familiar 'tune' inside the computer, as it made the connection down the phone line.

My new friend was amazed.  While his fingers were nimbly transferring what he found on my phone to his computer terminal to determine the most suitable package to meet my requirements, his mind was trying to comprehend an environment without constant internet availability.  "How did that work?" he asked.  After I'd tried to explain, he told me, "I didn't know anything about that ... I wasn't born until 1999!"

We went on to talk about memory - a term he only understood in terms of megabytes - and I tapped my head to indicate that I meant the human kind, commenting about the way we're no longer able to retain such volumes of data in our mind as in days of yore.  As I told him, I can still remember part numbers from an engineering works where I worked 45 years ago, because they were embedded into my mind for daily reference, to avoid looking them up when required.  Ask me a phone number today, however, and I'd be lost.  All my phone numbers are electronically stored in the list that he'd just copied in a flash from the old phone to the new one for which I had just signed a contract.

Data was another word that required some translation between us.  I have only ever thought of it as an amount of information stored in some way for reference, or to be collected for research.  In our conversation to establish what phone and what contract would be best for me, I found it being used to refer to the capacity for data that might or might not be required: the diameter of the pipe or size of the tank, if you will, rather than the actual volume of water that might flow through and fill these fittings.

Suffice to say that, after the time it would take a football match to proceed from kick-off to final whistle, I emerged into the twilight possessed of a new device that will revolutionise my daily life.  Already it has brought new sounds to my desktop - the wooden one, as opposed to the picture on my computer screen! - and it's also threatening to make obsolete my tablet (electronic, rather than medicinal), because it is capable of so much more than its predecessor.

If my mind survives this technological revolution, there will be more news next week.