Part 24
Just so you know, technophobia has not gotten the best of me by any means. If truth be told, I’ve taken a win every time I beat a technological beast and sat back on my laurels knowing that, against all odds, I triumphed. Those indeed were moments of great pleasure for me.
I’m truly quite an optimist. It’s my opinion that the human spirit, encouraged, can put aside doom and gloom with hopes for better tomorrows…despite computers feigning friendships that hobble us, Internet crime running rampant and even acts of terror made easier by computer insecurity.
I believe that in the wake of failures, we must allow ourselves to hope again. It’s therapeutic to see that life can be good and to experience real, undiluted pleasure.
In fact, pleasure helps move the process along. For example, looking around me, I sense momentary breaks in the grey pall of Britain’s winter months. Sly hints of the “darling buds of May” and spring’s effervescent burgeoning of new life remind me that the creative cycle occurs again and again. Trees clothe their nakedness, squirrels busily forage, lambs frolic and green hills begin to sparkle.
I’ve had much pleasure in my life that has re-energized me and strengthened my belief in the future and the real expectation that we’re entering an era when all good things are possible as malevolence wanes. Brief and far between these moments, nevertheless, continue to buoy me…
I recall, at two years old, a pedal car that my Dad had built a roof on and the special moment of driving it around the garden.
And, at eight, the explosion of joy everywhere with the end of war and no more bombs, Buzz bombs and V2 rockets overhead, tinging our wartime childhoods with uncertainty.
A few months in a small village in Switzerland high in the Alps where peace had never left, fishing, collecting mushrooms, scavenging for winter’s wood supplies on the hillside and tasting sweet harvest wine whilst loading hay onto wagons.
My first-ever Coca-Cola in a seaside café in Alexandria, Egypt. The wonder of tropical fish amidst the coral off a beach in Kenya. My first sight of Cape Town’s Table Mountain as we arrived driving 1,200 miles from Durban in a 1928 Plymouth Coupe, with me squashed into the “dickie” seat at the back of the car.
Resting on a lone climb up Table Mountain’s Skeleton Gorge in gentle mist with the wind clack-clacking in dry branches of trees, creating an other-worldly sight and sound of times long past.
First stirrings of seemingly eternal love with that first tremulous kiss that, no matter how often repeated, never regained its first impact.
Public wearing of my white with red braid Rugby Honours jacket that meant so much more to me than those who saw me wear it!
Hearing faint sounds in the silence of the dune-laden Namib sands and realizing I was listening to the sound of my own breathing, leaving me in awe of the vastness and beauty of my surrounds. Later, listening to Rachmaninoff whilst staring at the same desert, I realized that sand and snow have similar abilities to impress, blanketing an otherwise busy world with visual and silent beauty.
Another climb to the top of Cathedral Peak, covered in mist, arriving well before other climbers. I heard the swish of swallows as they circled the summit, darting in and out of the cool blanket that had enfolded me on my bed of rock in the Drakensburg peaks, creating an ethereal presence of other possible entities. When my life’s partner, Hero, and I kissed to seal the moment that we wed, wearing crowns of blossoms and trailing ribbons held by three best men, in a Greek Orthodox ceremony with a priest whispering best camera angles to the photographer.
Other pleasure moments came later, but these were the special ones, meaningless to others perhaps but holding so many memories of times when I happily felt exterior to the world around me. Moments like these make the “phobias” of life so insignificant and conquerable!
We all clash with the world around us and think things are hard, but just recall your own special moments and reignite the spark of hope that promises better times in days ahead!
For myself, I also contemplate future pleasures, like knowing I’ll be at cause for the first time over computer technology. This subject has both intrigued and frustrated me for years. A true problem, I can’t seem to live with it or without it. It’s like brushing my teeth… needed but irritating.
ExoTech is a brand-new species of software that “thinks” like a human. It solves the problems of today’s computers. Like me, it aims to best the barriers we technophobes have encountered ever since those phobias began. And if that happened, it would be a true pleasure for me. What about you?
What People Are Saying
Dear Chris,
I’ve been reading your many fantastic technophobe blog entries and felt the urge to let you know you’re not the only one out there. So let me share my attitude with you…
Computers – you either love ‘em, or (more likely) you hate ‘em!
Of course, I “knew” all about computers as a young man. At that time, you needed a whole city block to have one, and after much clicking and clattering, you’d get a series of small cards with your “print-out.” Which could then go for analysis. Not much good for you or me or the other guy who needed help organizing and running his own life.
But times changed and computers finally found their way into the marketplace where people excitedly (but with some trepidation) went to see them at trade shows and special shops, to view them, almost like animals at a zoo. I once visited a computer shop. The salesman told me the computer on display was the latest thing, promised it would save me many hours of time in my daily endeavours and showed it to me. I remember him drawing a “circle,” which he pointed out the computer had done on its own, but the short straight lines that it was made up of were still visible. I was not impressed. And besides, circles weren’t a top-priority skill I needed from a machine.
The salesman pressed forward, “This computer is very user-friendly.”
“I don’t want a computer that’s friendly to the user,” I responded instantly. “I want one that is friendly to the non-user…me!” Obviously, he failed to make a sale.
Time marched on, and in the late 1970s I became a convert of sorts, wanting to have and use this marvellous new, now more widely available invention: the IBM Personal Computer. This, I decided, will help me with my business. I spent a lot of money on that computer, a box with 10 ports and some terminals. I could save our production in 8-bit size, but only 8 characters at a time. Still too much pain. But at the time there was no other choice; that was the most up-to-date computer there was.
Like you, Chris, I’ve stumbled through the decades since with one computer after the other, all somewhat mimicking the original pain, like a series of unfortunate accidents that keep happening to me.
But now, with ExoTech to be launched soon, my demands for simplicity will finally be met. I am still a dedicated non-user, but having worked with the Peter Warren Team for a few years now, I know what is about to happen. A very user-friendly computer software for which I need only know the ON switch, and then no programs, no saving ever, and multiple uses all integrated in and with each other. Ahhhhhhhh…
Thanks for letting me tell you how I feel, and thanks for being a technophobe! It’s great to be able to speak to one of my own kind!
Alan Douglas, 15 Jan 2020
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.