Vanessa Austin Locke: Force Quit – dealing with a technological meltdown

My grandma used to have terrible trouble working her TV/VCR combi.

She was 90, so it was understandable. There were two remotes. They had weird symbols on them. She’d get stuck on one channel for ages.

I used to write out labels and instructions when I went to visit her, but it didn’t seem to help, she couldn’t get her head around it. She was 90, after all. It was to be expected.

Now, here I sit on my living room floor, desperately trying to procrastinate from writing this column by watching I Wanna Marry “Harry” (God bless ITV2 for all the crying American girls), and deleting Facebook ‘friends’ I haven’t seen for donkey’s years. Here I sit, surrounded by six remote controls (six!), tangles of cables and whirring machinery, all of which is jammed. At the tender age of Not Telling, I think of my 90-year-old grandma and feel a sudden wave of empathy. But she was 90! She grew up with chalk slates and library books. What’s my excuse?

I don’t consider myself a total technophobe. I’m no GCHQ hacker, but it seems like every time I turn on my computer/TV/digital radio, something needs updating, new software needs installing, or something’s just not working, and up pops an unintelligible notice telling me that ‘an error occurred while displaying the previous error’. I went to the Apple ‘Genius’ Bar a couple of times (I’d really like to see those guys’ average IQ scores) but it’s like going to the doctor, they can only give you a few minutes, and when all your electrical equipment is in spasm and you need some kind of computing degree just to keep up with Apple’s technology (iCloud has disrupted my entire world and nothing works any more), well, I had to Force Quit.

“My laptop has been trapped by the spinning wheel of torment”

Today my Apple TV ‘needs updating’. Again. I swear this happens every week and takes a good hour, by which time I’m soooo over whatever it is I wanted to watch. My Netflix account ‘cannot connect’. Again. This also happens every week or so, even though I’m assured my connection is tiptop. My laptop has been trapped by the spinning wheel of torment. And by the way, Apple, making it rainbow-coloured doesn’t make this any less annoying – I’d rather have Microsoft’s egg timer, then at least I could watch as the sands of my life disappear irrevocably into the past. My iPhone is covered in those disturbing red blobs that make it look as if it’s got measles. Meanwhile, every time I try to do anything on the big computer, messages ping at me or applications start bouncing, demanding my attention and distracting me from whatever it was I was trying to do, which of course I’ve totally forgotten about because of all these techno-children pulling at my apron strings. If I can’t hack it now (no pun intended), what the hell am I going to be like when I’m 90?

That’s when I turned to the iPod that my man hooked up to the speakers wirelessly via some kind of Airport/Bluetooth thingy. Classical music will not let me down – it’s old and therefore above the clutches of technology.

‘This device cannot pair with living room speakers’. The speakers hit the wall, crackled and died. I picked up a notebook and wrote this column by hand.

It took me 20 minutes.

Remember how technology was supposed to make our lives simpler?