Phone Fidelity

What has the world come to?

What would we do without phones? The answer for most people would be to break down and cry. This relentless weeping would then start a local flood around each person. These small quantities of water would add up to make a vast ocean, making the water levels rise exponentially, simulating what would happen when the polar ice caps melt. This consciousness of the inevitable apocalypse would only help to make people sob even more and increase the rate of rising waters. Eventually, the whole of the world will become one enormous ocean, forcing Wikipedia to change the title of its article about ‘Earth’ to ‘Ocean’. At least the fish will be happy.

The point I’m trying to make here is that the dependence of much of the human race on mobile phones is gigantic. We’re more dependent on phones than growing plants are dependent on sunlight. It’s absurd!

The modal age group is the teenagers, so obsessed that they probably wouldn’t notice if we stuck their hands to their phones with superglue. As long as the thumbs are free to move around to send pointless texts to supposedly important people, the gluing wouldn't be noticed. There’s an incredibly close relationship with teenagers and phones, but one that’s easily broken and replaceable with another relationship with another phone. Teenage phone fidelity is astonishingly low. The relationship with teenagers and mobile phone is like that of extremely shallow parents and a new born baby.

The first few weeks of a new phone is the most enjoyable for teenagers but most annoying for every other person they know. Like a baby, it is showcased to every single person in the world, its many talents being flaunted like everything else is somehow inferior. The shiny rectangle manages to climb to the top of the gadget hierarchy, clambering over the dated bricks that lay before it.

But the unrequited love soon decays into annoyance, as the phone/baby begins to show its true colours. It doesn’t do what it’s expected to do and it’s lost its initial charm. It’s become a dated brick, a useless lump of plastic and electronics, slowly driving the user insane. Before long, it becomes a major infuriation, making said teenager fume and anger whenever they need to use the phone. Texting has never been so annoying.

Then a miracle occurs. A new phone is advertised and there are so many gadgets, apps and general awesomeness surrounding this new chunk of electronic wizardry, it's just madness not to go out and buy it. The dated brick is thrown away without a thought as the new phone is quickly purchased, ready to begin the cycle once again.

Iphones are the worst at this. The times between each new model coming out can be measured accurately using milliseconds as the sheep-like public flit between overpriced shiny rectangles like girls trying to decide which dress to wear on a night out. You can never have a committed relationship with an Iphone, it’s just against my made up laws of physics. I reckon the phone infidelity rate is due to the microwave radiation of using the phone messing with the brain of the user, destroying the part of their brain that makes rational decisions, and this will increase disloyalty levels.

I must stress, the reference to relationships with phones in this article is purely metaphorical, no-one should be having a full blown romantic relationship with a phone.  Like using a multi-storey car-park to store dead bodies, it’s wrong on so many levels.

While you laugh uncontrollably at that last belly aching joke, I will continue planning my method of eradicating mobile phones from the world. After I buy my rubber dinghy in preparation for the aftermath.

The Screensaver of Life

Enough colour to burn the retinas off a blind man

I don’t often watch sport on TV. Mainly because I just don’t like the idea of wasting 90 minutes of my life watching a ball bounce back and forth across a piece of grass while 22 overpaid simpletons chase after it like children chasing a balloon. Or spending hours on end seeing athletes put one foot in front of the other again and again until they reach a certain line.

I’m not saying I don’t enjoy watching sport, I’m just saying I wouldn’t go out of my way to watch it. It’s perfect as a life screensaver, quietly existing in the background while I go about my daily business. Every so often you catch a fleeting glimpse of the action, pause momentarily to see what’s going on before continuing with life. This visual distraction will always continue to exist, seemly repetitive yet unnoticeably different each time, a perfect screensaver for life.

I do however enjoy participating in sport. The whole idea of sport is the notion of exercising, getting out of breath and doing it yourself. You feel good after you’ve spent a lot of time exercising, doing real sport but the same feeling of satisfaction doesn’t happen after watching it for hours on end. And watching it for an extended period of time can have rather detrimental effects. Especially on your eyes.

Sport on the box is very much a visual explosion of extravagant colours. Football players wearing bright red and blue against a green pitch. Snooker tables with the entire visible spectrum represented in different coloured balls. Even athletics with an orangey-brown track whose colour sometimes seems to engulf athletes as they power round it. It’s a swirling vortex of varying wavelengths of light; a garish laser of vibrancy that burns your eyes like a flamethrower. It’s like someone’s eaten a packet of Skittles and vomited a rainbow. Not nice.

Different sports look like they’re trying to compete to be the most colourful, like male peacocks trying to woo a female. I reckon that’s why pubs always tend to show sport on their TVs. The drab colours of the pub, combined with the dreary colours worn by most of their patrons seems to create a colour vacuum that needs to be filled with an eruption of colours, painting happiness onto the souls of everyone there.

Sports news is incredibly tedious as well, usually involving a presenter reading out scores of matches and events that have happened recently. It sounds less like a news report than someone reading out an arbitrary string of randomly generated numbers. They might as well read out the first million digits of Pi. This is usually followed by a lengthy discussion about the matches and events, including highlights which basically remove the need to watch the match at all. It’s nostalgia for people with short term memories.

And it’s incredibly invasive on other news. I switch on to BBC News in the morning, expecting a concise, succinct update on the news stories of the moment so I can be well informed of important events in the world as I go out into the real world. Instead, I have to sit through some idiotic presenter babbling on about how someone kicked a ball in quite a lucky way and how it hit a bit of net. There seems to be equal amount of time spent on breaking news stories such as the recession or pandemic diseases and some people running around.

Some of you reading this may feel strong opinions against this article, because you enjoy watching sport on TV on a daily basis. To be honest, I’ve only addressed my side of the argument. Just like football, I'm not really being a good sport.

Red Light Fight

The colour of anger

It’s Monday morning and you’ve just left the house, ready for a day’s hard work.  You get into the car and off you go.

You’re driving along and you see a set of traffic lights in the distance. But no action needs to be taken, as they are shining green. The colour that symbolises happiness on the road. As you approach the lights, you see that they’re part of a pelican crossing, but there isn’t a pedestrian in sight.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a pedestrian materialises, heading towards the crossing, ready to turn the lights red, on the way to their job at Sod’s Law Corporation.  You make eye contact, pleading them not to do the deed. But since you’re a polluting anti-environmentalist by owning a car, your plea fails almost instantly. They outstretch their arm and press the button, signalling the start of a race.

It’s Traffic Lights vs. Car in a race that will take a multitude of seconds, over a distance of many metres. The traffic lights will change at any moment, and no-one knows when. Not even an omniscient God or time travelling alien will know when the change will occur. You have no chance.

There are two decisions to choose from, with both advantages and disadvantages. Option one involves slowing down as you approach the crossing, assuming that the lights will have turned red by the time you get there. The disadvantage to this is that if the lights turn red just as you arrive at the crossing, you will always know that if you had just gone a little bit faster, you could have passed the crossing with time to spare. The cars behind will mock your apprehensiveness and the guilt will never leave. You can feel your dignity leaking out like the air in a dinghy that’s been maliciously attacked by beach crabs.

Option two is the Jeremy Clarkson option, which is going for maximum power, knowing that the quicker you get there, the less chance there is of the lights changing. If the lights turn red very quickly, you must sharply apply the brakes, coming to a stop just before the crossing, and watching as the pedestrian saunters across, wearing the inevitable smug look. They might as well come up to you and begin a lengthy statement where they explain all the disadvantages of your method and take a picture of your depressed face and post it on the Internet with the caption ‘Fail’. There is the added disadvantage of every car behind you seeing you go for it and failing. The embarrassment will never leave.

This decision must be made in an instant and you’re never right. Sod’s Law will always hold and whichever method you try will be fruitless. If you go for the slow option, the lights will remain green for literally hours, but if you go for the fast option, the lights will change faster than Usain Bolt being chased by a murderer wielding an axe while driving a Bugatti Veyron.

Yet if you ever do become a pedestrian, the lights will always take a long time to change. There is enough time for a snail on heroin to crawl across. In slow motion.

And the pedestrian will then get to Sod’s Law Corporation on time, just in time to choreograph the next morning procedure where your attempts will fail once again.