Dangerous curves ahead

I LEARNED AN important lesson the other day: always read the specifications before buying a PC game. It’s something that I should have learned a lot sooner, I know. I can’t think of a time when I have bought any PC game that worked out of the box on my home computer, yet I keep falling into the same incompatibility trap, taking those games home only to find that they won’t work.


Even Doom, which I played when I was still in touch with my hair, required a boot disk to get enough memory out of the PC just to load. Since then, games have either not worked or worked very badly on whichever home machine I’ve had at the time.


This time around, it was Diablo 3 that caused me to slap my ever-increasing forehead and curse myself for not paying closer – or, for that matter, any – attention to the requirements. I spent hours downloading and updating the game, which requires a painful online activation process, then mere milliseconds being told that it
would not work with my video card, and finally tens of minutes stomping around the garden in anger as a result.

REPETITIVE STRAIN

Now, thanks to all this repetition, and stomping, I have learned the lesson that I should have learned all that time ago. I’ve decided that from this moment forward, I must read the manual, specifications, and system requirements before doing anything. From now on, wherever there are peripherals, mice or PC games, there you will find me reading the paperwork. And liking it. It’s a fine lesson, and one that I am sure will give me a
lot of pleasure, and my neighbours a lot more undisturbed sleep. But has it lead to another problem?


Maybe, now I’ve learned this, I will have forgotten something else – something even more important. Perhaps I am sitting writing this on an old typewriter, and wondering what that ribbon thing is, and what happened to its DVD drive. Maybe my fiancée will find me standing in the street with no trousers on, trying to make a phone call. Perhaps I’ll drive the wrong car home from the supermarket, or maybe I’ll just forget to buy any more games.

LEARNING SWERVE

This situation, which has annoyed me more than is reasonable, has made me realise just how poor my learning curve is. Right now, at the tender age of 37, I am pretty good with technology. It has taken me a while, but I am doing OK. But what if this is my lot? What if I am done learning? It bothers me that I may have reached the limit of what I can do.


Sure, I can pretty much find my way around my smartphone, and I can generally fix the sort of problems my home PC throws up, such as forgetting it has a soundcard, for example. I’ve fixed up my home entertainment
system – we’ll call that a telly for shorthand – and my car has never run out of oil. Hell, I can even put up a shelf.


Other things have gone along the way, though. Pop into my brain, and ask it what happened to the ability to Mail Merge, which is something I think I used to do a lot of once upon a time, and your question will bounce
around like an echo, before falling into a corner next to questions such as “Where is the charger for my camera?” and “Why did I buy that really cheap Android tablet?”


Worse, I’ve forgotten how to create a spreadsheet, and Apple’s iTunes has become a strange and confusing land. These abilities and understandings have gone – deleted and replaced with facts such as what kind of
SD card I need, and how many USB slots my laptops has.


I’m just about coping with new technology at the moment, but I’m standing on the edge of a technological cliff, one where the next gust of innovation could knock me off the edge.

APEING THE APE

Obviously, I’m glad to have used Microsoft Kinect and the Nintendo Wii, because it means I will never be the person in the old people’s home who thinks everyone else is trying to swat invisible bees, and I won’t be the only one on the ward who thinks tablets are what keep me regular.


I’ve done my time with technology. I’ve swiped things, pinched things and grabbed others; I’ve connected to a hotspot while having a latte, I’ve streamed a movie to a games console, I’ve had a four-way chat with people that I don’t know over video, and I’ve accidentally Bluetoothed the wrong photo to the wrong person in a pub. Hell, I’ve done it all. So far.


But I dread to think what’s coming. If mobile phones turn into implants that slide into your ear and cheeks, I’ll probably have to pass, and if buying a ticket at a train station involves pressing your palm or eyeball against a scanner, I’ll be the chap fumbling with change at the retro counterwith-real-man combo. Taking on
the alternative will definitely put me at risk of forgetting my trousers. And no-one wants that.


There is hope, though. I’ve seen footage of an ape enjoying a tablet computer. If a simian can do it, I’m sure I’ll always get some enjoyment from technology, whether I understand it or not.