Tony Klinger

This is the first step of my twelve step program to release me from my addiction. Hello my name is Tony Klinger and I am a new technology addict. The crowd will all nod and greet me as we seek release from this terrible affliction.

It started like this. I always prided myself on being on the cutting edge of new technology. OK, I’m not young enough to inhabit the bleeding edge enjoyed masochistically by some of the people I know. They want to use kit that hasn’t yet come out of some obscure lab in Northern California, Tokyo or Tel Aviv, where the mad boffins work. These people will do anything, queue in the middle of the night, lie, steal and commit acts of desperation to get their hands on the latest mobile phone, game, TV or MP3 player.

I know that I don’t really need a giant screen TV with High Definition quality and several million pixels more than I used to have. It doesn’t do me any good to realize that it isn’t strictly necessary to have sound that totally envelopes my living room. Or that once achieved it shouldn’t be spread to other rooms like some electronic weed that is doomed to take over the entire planet.

Having survived and moved forward some time ago from being happy enough to work on a typewriter I first came to the smallest whiff of a problem when I saw my first Amstrad word processor. Up until that point I wasn’t totally convinced, except by price, that it was actually better or more effective to type than to simply write my various jottings in capital letters. This was my habit for everything up to a certain point, and then I would give my work to the typists who would charge me a great deal of money to type my manuscripts prior to its professional distribution. This was the pattern for most writers when I was coming of age. It never occurred to any of us that we might type the stuff ourselves, even if we could. It seemed too time consuming and not the right thing for a serious writer, when that was really what journalists did. This was long before I had ever written anything for the press myself.

The Amstrad liberated us from the need for a typist, and turned us into typists instead. It also taught us the joys of cut and paste, and this was a wonder brought direct to us from the Lord above. We could now adjust our text with very little effort, make corrections and edit our work in an instant. This was something so astonishingly wonderful that I think many writers made small sacrifices in the direction of Alan Sugar’s offices above his empire that was Amstrad.

Time passed and it became clear that one needed to graduate to grown up computing and you were left with a stark choice, either regular PC’s, led initially by IBM or the new, groovy and decidedly sexier Apple and the  Macs. It sounds like a rock group doesn’t it,  Apple and the Macs?

Once the power of the Mac has insinuated itself into you nervous system all is lost. Rational thought becomes a thing of the past, a past when you could make decisions based on logic not emotional nonsense. Now I wasn’t evaluating performance so much as I was comparing size, design, shiny new slim line brushed metal boxes, with great screen savers. I was lost, and Lord alone I needed help.

Just when I might have found redemption they made me Director of the Media Production Centre in the University of East London. Clearly this was the Devil’s way of placing me in the maximum point of danger, the very lip of hell and damnation. There was no place to hide and because of my position there were Apple sales managers at my very beck and call, enticing me with ever better packages and educational discounts.

As if this wasn’t bad enough there were further blandishments hurled in front of me, software without end, opportunities to Beta test and develop to our own needs. The Devil crooked his finger still further and now there was nothing to save me as I entered the realm of the mobile telephone interactive content developer. Now we had to have the very latest mobile phone to work with the very latest in Mac computing. The end was nigh.

I went from Nokia to Motorola and then on to the blessed Blackberry. This was mainlining on Class A gadgets, and I was weak and exposed to temptation I couldn’t resist. I gave in so totally I am yet to recover. I moved from BlackBerry to BlackBerry Pearl and now to BlackBerry Storm. It is a wondrous tool,  it seems to hate my equally fantastic my MacBook Air! Such is their incompatibility that they won’t even speak with one another. I’ve tried to introduce them, but there is no hint that they want to share my contacts, music files,  appointments, in fact anything at all. Now they sit on my desk, sullenly staring at one another like angry plastic. I went to the Vodafone shop and they did that sucking in air through front teeth thing which means they have seen plenty examples of this problem, but haven’t come up with any easy quick fixes. I limped to the Apple shop, and their Genius also had the sucking through teeth thing down, but other than recommend I switch to the IPhone didn’t have any easy solutions either.I

I think I am going to strike, not buy another appliance of any kind until all these suppliers decide to do something for all the people like me who don’t want to spend our lives trying to synch these devices up. I want them to make all the devices use universal external connections and to be seamlessly compatible. After all what the world be like if the petrol (gas) caps in our cars were all individual and didn’t fit all the petrol nozzles at all the gas stations. Ridiculous isn’t it, but that’s what we have here.

Meanwhile I shall stagger through my sub standard connectivity and will use my wonderful kit as well as I can until some nice nerd sorts me out. In the meantime I pledge that I shall not buy a single new gadget, I promise, unless its really shiny!