Smart tech’..or just Smart Aleck?

Illustration for “Cybernetics” ; Boris Artzybasheff..1950.

Smart Tech’ or just; “Smart Aleck”?

This age of “smart-phones” or “clever computers” doesn’t enthral me that much..sure, these new inventions can be called innovative, but I still reckon the invention of the grease-cup where you turn the cap to force grease into the needed lubricant place as equal or even better in a more practical sense..after all, where would we all be if the wheel, ANY wheel, stops turning?

So I don’t revere the goings on inside my desk-top computer, as long as the bloody thing does what I expect it to do without the outside interference of some anonymous, malicious, distant techy deciding to re-invent the wheel and suddenly change the applied program that runs the bloody thing, I’m happy. After all, my carpenter’s tool-box is chockers with hand-tools that were invented more than a millennium ago and still function most admirably..so why “fix” something when it ain’t broke!?

But ah..the IT techies are the new high priests of this age…My wife bought an Apple smart-watch to assist her in her health counts; heart-beats, exercise measurements etc..So down we go to the Apple store in the city..STORE!!..more like a basilica of immense proportions and ceiling height, with large, flat oak tables much like altars, where the appropriately garbed acolytes, with just a touch of the fingers on a secret location on those oak tables and up popped electrical service points, from whence was dispensed the blessings and dispensations of “Apple Corp’” with a communion-like efficiency to the congregated penitents.

I ask; Why all the theatre?…it’s not some magic show, it’s just a shop after all..Tommy Johnson’s “4Square” store back in my day sold just as much stuff there displayed clearly in glass cabinet or open shelf..an’ if’n I asked for threepence of mixed lollies, you can be sure he dispensed such fairly..and would occasionally throw in a big “gob-stopper” for a special treat!

Mind you, unlike the regular religious establishments that rely on the power of a heavenly host to grace the patrons with a sense of security in their place of worship, this sacred locale had a heavy hoofed bloke of rather solid proportion and appropriate brutish phiz to “squizz the clientele” just in case. In contrast to the younger folk dispensing Apple technology, who most likely were recruited from local university pools of IT graduates, this “bit o’ rough” was more likely recruited from the pool-room of a Hindley Street “university of hard knocks” back-bar!

The one young presbyter who served us, brought out from the inner sanctum of the “cathedral” a small oblong box of tightly encased soft, white paper and laid it reverently before my wife with a pointed finger instructing her, and only her, to fold back two cardboard tabs…this done with trembling doubt, that soft paper unfolded as if by magic like a lotus flower opening, revealing another smaller even more whiter box within..again two tabs were instructed to be folded back and the wide-eyed acolyte then lifted the snug-fitting lid of this second package to reveal (almost with a drum-roll!)……..”It’s only a bleedin’ watch-band!” I cried in a much too loud voice….there was a rumble of gasping from so many nearby congregationalists, that I felt like I was back in my altar-boy days and had committed a sacrilege on the holy host of the Lord Jesus Christ!…

It was then that I thought it best to vacate the hallowed hall before the aforementioned “heavy” bore down on me with pontifical chastisement, to let my wife be baptised into “The Faith” and go wait outside in the shopping mall and mingle with the peasants in the real world.

And hey…..there’s some pretty strange peasants there in that mall on a Wednesday afternoon!