Living in our brave new high-tech age

ISN’T TECHNOLOGY wonderful – especially when it works!

Unfortunately, I think I’m a little jinxed when it comes to the high tech stuff.

For example, on our recent holiday, our Kindle packed up after just one hour’s use. (I’m sure I fully recharged it.)  It would have left me stranded, literature-less, had I not been at the airport where I hastily picked up a much more reliable paperback at the bookshop to keep me amused.

Again, we purchased a Sat Nav device a couple of weeks ago, intending to use it to find our way to the hotel near Liverpool Airport – always a little confusing.

The first device was a Garmin and it refused all attempts to find a satellite. I returned it to the dealer and it was exchanged, this time for a TomTom device of similar specs. On our drive down to the airport the thing kept conking out on us with a message to say that the battery was not charged. Things got stranger when we neared Liverpool and the device started giving us directions for the streets of Buxton! On the way home we resorted to using a good, old-fashioned paper atlas.

I’ve contacted TomTom and they have advised me on a course of action – it seems another battery defect of some sort – but, so far, without result.

It’s not a dissimilar story with our PC and our laptop which occasionally seize up – always without warning and usually at the most inconvenient moment imaginable. Sometimes they refuse to start up, sometimes to shut down; sometimes they go into a “sleep” mode so deep that they refuse to wake up again. And sometimes it’s the software that flatly refuses to work the way it should.

And all this worries me when I think of our new car, and amount of technological wizardry it has as standard. Surely, the more complicated they make it the more there is to go agley.

And of course, now, we have “smart” phones and “smart” TVs and the like.

I shudder at the prospect of all this “smart” stuff going wrong. What will our brave new world be like then?