Is It Just Me? (9 page)

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spits tea out
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Sorry about that . . .

Because I suppose the good thing about the low-pressure job is . . .

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starts to take another sip of tea
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. . . that we have time to go on loads of dates . . .

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spits tea out again
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Sorry. Could we perhaps maybe talk about the whole dating/husband issue at a later (pun coming) date. (Good one, Hart, good one.)

Well, MDRC, I hope that if you work in an office in a stimulating but junior role (or even if you’re the CEO, dammit), then I’ve given you some ideas for how best to pass your time. If you’ve any suggestions for other ways to have good, clean fun in an office environment, then please do page or email me (remembering to cc in all staff, trustees and offices in England, Wales and Scotland). Kindest regards, M Hart, Office Manager.

Hang on . . .

Do you mind? I’ve just brought the chapter to a rather magnificent close –

You never explained the email thing. Did you mean post? Because if so, how could you accidentally post something to lots of people? Surely you’d notice that you were doing it as you put the notes in all the envelopes and licked the hundreds of stamps. Unless you did it in your sleep . . .

Oh, dear. Well, email is . . . goodness. Email is . . . No. I think we’ll need to have a separate chapter on this.

MDRC, please turn the page, and give yourself a round of applause for doing so (although I appreciate you can’t do both at once, so you’ll have to turn the page, put the book down, then applaud – but please do your best). And off we trot into the next chapter where we shall discuss . . . Technology. Exciting, isn’t it?

O
ne thing that has most definitely changed since I was eighteen, apart from the fact that I can’t now wave without a flap of bingo-wing arm-flesh hitting me in the eye, or the fact that I can’t freely sneeze or trampoline without the risk of doing a bit of wee, or my inability to receive an evening invitation without exclaiming, ‘Oh, no can do. There’s a
Morse
marathon on telly that night, are you mad?’ or . . . no, I should stop, I’m depressing myself. And what’s that I hear you say? ‘Enough of this bingo-wing wee talk, Miranda. The title suggested that this was to be a chapter about Technology, not the indignities of the ageing process. So hop to it.’ Fair enough, MDRC, fair enough. My point was to be this – that what has most definitely changed since I was a young ’un is, of course, the marvellous, mysterious world of Technology.

It’s extraordinary, isn’t it, to think of the unequivocally wonderful and life-affirming changes that have come about as the result of technological progress? How strange to think that at nineteen, I headed to Australia for five months, just me and Clare-Bear, without even a mobile phone for company –

What do you mean? Why would you take the portable phone with you?

What?

Well, I presume by ‘mobile phone’ you meant portable phone? You know, the cordless one that Mum has? That is AMAZE-BALLS. Yesterday, I talked to Clare-Bear for an hour on my own in my room and walked about when talking, too. Didn’t have to sit by where the phone’s plugged in with Mum listening to our conversation about who Clare-Bear snogged the night before. It’s so cool.

Right . . . No, I meant a mobile phone. It’s new to you. It’s totally mobile. You can make a call from anywhere.

You mean I could be right at the end of the garden, and still make a call? Because Mum’s cuts out when you’re just outside the kitchen. It goes ‘Pfffffhhht’ and stops.

You could be absolutely anywhere and still make a call. You could be at the top of Ben Nevis, the Australian Outback, anywhere. It’s a mobile phone.
Mobile
.

Don’t be stupid! Where’s it plugged in?

It’s a MOBILE! IT HAS BATTERIES AND DOESN’T HAVE TO BE PLUGGED IN! IT’S
MOBILE
. YOU TAKE IT WITH YOU. IT’S MOBILE – YOU CAN CALL FROM ANYWHERE.
MOBILE
PHONE! And, breathe. (MDRC, I fear this chapter might test my patience. We’ll simply have to bear with our eighteen-year-old chum on this one.)

Are you making this up?

No. And you can send people written messages on them as well.

What, like a telegram? Where does it print out?

The telephone has a screen on it.

A bit like a calculator? I wrote ‘Boobless’ to Beady on mine in Chemistry class yesterday (SO funny).

These messages aren’t just limited to ‘Boobless’, ‘ShellOil’ and ‘Esso’. You can write anything. They’re called ‘texts’.

Texts? Why don’t you just call them, if it’s a phone?

Because sometimes you can’t be bothered to call. If you’re running a bit late you can send a quick note saying: ‘Will be there in 5.’

What’s the point in doing a ‘text’ to say that? You’re going to be ‘there in 5’ anyway.

It’s polite. It’s what we do. Sometimes we text a full conversation . . .

You press buttons for words to come up on a phone instead of just calling someone when it’s a phone anyway? One word – WHY?

BECAUSE . . . Well . . . because . . . ummm . . . no, hang on . . . because sometimes conversations are more amusing in text form. And it’s good for quickly making plans.

But that could just be a VERY QUICK PHONE CALL. BECAUSE IT’S A PHONE!

Look, FORGET TEXTS! Get this – you can even send photos to someone else’s phone screen, if you want.

Don’t be stupid. How can you send a photo through a PHONE? Are you also driving cars in the sky? How does it all even work?

Ummm . . . well . . . there’s a satellite in the sky that . . . uh . . . bounces rays of information on a . . . a superhighway.

So there ARE highways in the sky? Can you drive cars on them?

They’re not literal highways. There’s sort of . . . an invisible energy and there are . . . waves of air . . . oh, I DON’T KNOW!

I knew you were talking rubbish. Photos on phones. Absurd.

It’s not rubbish. It’s just an advance on digital cameras.

What are they?

AAAAAHHHH! OK. They’re cameras, and you can see the photo as soon as you take it.

Impossible! Even in Boots in Waterlooville the quickest development time is three days.

Please shut your face.

RUDE.

This is just getting more complicated than I’d hoped. Bear with. So the photo immediately comes up on the screen on the camera and you take a photo and if you don’t like it, you can just get rid of it and take another one.

OK, so you’re looking at a view, and you take a photo. Do you then have to look at the photo of what you are ALREADY LOOKING AT, and decide if you like the photo?

Yes. Then take another photo if we don’t like it.

Then presumably look at it to see if you like that one?

Yeah. See, if it’s a fun photo, whether your friends look good, if you’re showing your best side –

How vain. You’re standing around looking at the photos on your camera instead of actually looking at the view. You IDIOT! Why don’t you stop looking at photos of what you’re experiencing, and just get on with . . . EXPERIENCING it?

We
are
experiencing it!

You’re not: you’re looking at photos of the thing you should be looking at.
You all sound mad. One of the best things is getting photos developed and remembering what we took. Like that time we got the photos back a week after the Isle of Wight school trip and found that photo we’d forgotten about of Bella putting a hotdog in Miss Everett’s anorak hood.

Oh, I give up. Just wait and see. You’ll enjoy it, you really will.

No, don’t you dare give up. You still haven’t explained this ‘email’ thing to me yet.

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collective deep breath
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Oh, MDRC, I’m exhausted. Are you keeping up? But I suppose we’d better do this.

An email is an ‘electronic mail’. You know when you type a letter on a computer?

I don’t have a computer. Why would I have a computer? What am I – a City banker?

Calm down. Right, you know when you type a letter on your electronic typewriter?

I can’t believe that thing. You press the delete button and Tipp-Ex is automatically in the machine, and it rubs the letter out. It’s total genius.

Yes, amazing. Anyway, imagine this – you type a letter on that, and it comes up on the paper. Except instead of coming up on the paper, it comes up on a computer screen. And then you can send it to another person’s screen. Anywhere in the world.

How does THAT work? Does it go on the invisible electric highway in the sky, too?

I DON’T KNOW HOW IT WORKS. I DON’T KNOW HOW ANYTHING WORKS! IT JUST DOES. IT JUST HAPPENS!

Now,
YOU
CALM DOWN! What about pens and paper? Do people still use them?

A bit. But we don’t really send letters any more.

Oh, but I LOVE getting letters. I love rushing to the door when the postman’s just been in the hope I’ll have a letter addressed to me to open. Then rush away to see what new writing paper the girls might have used to tell me their holiday gossip. I would really miss that. Not to mention the exotic French handwriting from pen pal Pierre in Perpignan.

But emails mean that you can do work absolutely anywhere. You can be on a train, and it can be exactly like you’re in the office. It’s great.

Seriously, HOW is that great? You are really bugging me now. Trains are NOT for working on. One of our very favourite things is looking at the lovely views, watching the world go by, having a pack lunch and getting excited about wherever it is you’re going.

I admit I had forgotten that.

Why don’t you try life without your mobile phone? Turn it off. Put it away.

WHAT? But I get into a panic in that brief moment I’m rummaging in the depths of my bag thinking I’ve lost my phone until I remember it’s in the special safe pouch at the front of it.

Oh, grow up! It’d just be for a week.

A WEEK! No, thanks. I’d feel abandoned. Alone. Isolated. Terrified. Weak. Constantly thinking that I might be missing something.

Where do you live? Central Sahara? Oh gosh, we don’t live in a remote desert do we?

No, in London.

Do we? Without Mum and Dad? That’s well cool, but hardly a place to be isolated, you – I will say it again – IDIOT. I think you’ll find that if someone really needs and wants to get in touch with you they will leave an answer phone message telling you to call them back like we do in 1991 – THANK YOU VERY MUCH! And there’s always a pay phone.

A pay phone?

Don’t they still exist?

Do you know – I have no idea. OK, well, how about this invention . . . You are quite a big fan of ‘optional silliness’, aren’t you, Little M?

I most certainly am. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that ‘optional silliness’ is what makes life worth living.

Then might I introduce you to the most wonderful thing about modern life? We call it . . . The Internet. And before you say ‘WHAT?’ again, the internet is the whole world on your computer. I can just go to my computer, type in whatever I want to find out about (which we call ‘googling’) and immediately I receive a vast mass of information.

That sounds very good, actually. I approve.

At last. Also, if you’ve got the internet, you can watch little video clips of funny things – like
You’ve Been Framed
, but on your computer, whenever you like. Yesterday I watched a penguin sneezing, a cat eating a cheeseburger, and some ducklings being blown over in the wind. (For seven hours, MDRC, but let’s not tell Little Miranda.)

OK. That is a bit brilliant.

And then you get this thing called Facebook, where basically all your friends have pages, and you have a page, and the pages say who you are, what you do . . .

But your friends know who you are and what you do.

No, wait, you can message each other little notes –

But you’ve got your mobile phones for that.

Yes, but these can be longer messages, if you want.

Isn’t that what emails are for?

Well, the messages are about different things to the sort of things you’d text or email. It might be about something you’ve just seen, a comment about what’s going on in the world, what you are up to . . .