There’s a t-shirt doing the rounds right now that popularises the fate of us geeks whenever we grace the doorsteps and driveways of friends and families.
It says something along the lines of: “No, I won’t fix your f***ing PC.”
I paraphrase; I think the t-shirt manufacturers wouldn’t get big sales using profanities, especially since the biggest techies these days seem to be aged about 7. Which reminds me – whatever happened to t-shirt hell, the most politically incorrect retailer in the history of shaped fabric.
Having been asked to pitch in with my tech tips in 2010 on an even more frequent basis than last year, and having overlooked the opportunity to buy one of these prophetic garments up until five minutes ago, a thought came to pass:
Why has technology passed so many by?
It didn’t take me long to figure it out.
Everyone does different things, has different priorities. We get caught up in the grind, and depending on our lifestyle we only need certain to know certain things at certain times.
Incredibly, for many computers only rank at fifth or even lower on the scale of important devices. In some households, washing machines, cars, dishwashers and vibrators jostle for podium places, edging out the laptop.
But tech is becoming increasingly ubiquitous (hark, granny – would you like an egg to masticate upon?) and soon these fools won’t have the choice of whether or not to bury their collective heads in the sand. You already need to read a manual to program a PVR – and I expect the convergence of everything into a pocketable gizmo will mean those t-shirts will be consigned to the recycling bins of history.
Think about it a little more deeply and another interesting concept emerges: why aren’t we educated to adapt to changing times and technologies?
You’re ok if you’re at school these days, where I’m led to believe teachers have been replaced by holograms and corporal punishment has been replaced by confiscating your Blackberry if you don’t hand in your maths homework on time, and there’s only 1 iPad between 2 because of cutbacks.
But what about those people who were born before all babies popped out as mini chavs?
Someone, somewhere could have seen this technological revolution. That God(in) chap said there’s a new industrial era every 70-80 years and we’re bang on the money.
But noone prepared us. Noone issued a manual.
And it doesn’t just relate to everyone being forced to adapt to and address everything being different.
While they have such things as computers on the menu in schools, they still don’t teach you ANYTHING about:
- Becoming an entrepreneur
- Becoming financially astute
- Becoming a parent
- Becoming self sufficient in a holistic sense – planning, cooking, keeping a home.
Unless you’re at MIT (some jumped-up coding house purporting to be an educational establishment in an American city with an indiscriminate number of s’s in it; should there be an apostrophe there?) or one of these technical colleges that seem to be robbing us of the last vestiges of green space, you don’t actually get anything you could remotely term vocational training.
It’s no wonder this world’s flat on its arse.
What do you think? Do we need a manual for life? If so, who should write it? Was the cat alive in the box? Did Angela Lansbury really used to sing opera? Hey, you’ve got a really, really cute sister!