All you need to do!

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Psion.

I wonder if that word means anything to you?  It brings a wry smile of almost satisfaction to me because I can relate to it directly and remember the pride with which my casual use of . . .

But I get beyond myself. 

In my largest (within hand reach, I’m not going to make that much effort) dictionary, The Encarta Dictionary  2,175 pages, it does not get a single mention. 

The Internet, however, suggests that Psion is a name that will be familiar to groups of people with whom I am not familiar: Gamers, Comic aficionados and the like.  Psion is a whole character class in Dungeons and Dragons, no less.  And in what sounds like an extract from one of the sci-fi, pseudo-scientific books in which psionic (i.e. telepathic and beyond) abilities are taken as the norm, it would appear that the word psion (J/ψ) refers to a subatomic particle, a flavour-neutral meson consisting of a charm quark and a charm antiquark.

As interesting or indeed unintelligible as the foregoing might be, these are not the definitions of the word Psion (with a capital ‘P’) that have meaning for me.

In the early 90s of the last century, which I am horrified to think is almost 30 years ago!  I was an early adopter of the Psion 3 a handheld, clam design personal ‘digital assistant’.  It had a small screen in one half of the clam and a keyboard in the other.  I was the only person I knew who had one of these and every time I used it (and I used it as often as I reasonably could) it excited techno-amazement and techno-envy, which more than justified its price!

Ever since I saw my first digital watch on Tomorrow’s World on the BBC and certainly when they came down enough in price for them to be afforded by mere mortals, I have been an infatuated devotee of things techno-electrical.

If I could count up the amount of money that I have spent on computers and computer-like things (which I have absolutely no intention of doing because of the shame that lies in quantifying the outrageous amounts that I have willingly squandered on the latest gadgets) I would probably find that the only recourse that I could possibly have to compensate for such extravagant monetary behaviour would be immediately to enter a Monastery, don a hair shirt and only take it off to start flagellating myself with scorpion whips (look it up, it’s not using the animals, especially as it’s my birth sign) as the lightest possible penance for such wilful throwing away of money.

But I don’t care.  I have gained more pleasure in my amassing and displaying gadgets than . . . well, I don’t want to go overboard here, there are other things and pleasures in my life that go beyond the mere electronic - but gadgets have given me satisfaction.  And as soon as I realized with computers that I was a ‘user’ and not suited to be a ‘programmer’ I was happy to indulge in machine after machine.  Monochrome screens burst forth into glorious colour; print went from dot matrix to laser to ink jet; memory went from 8kb ROM (sic!) on my very first ‘real’ computer the famous Sinclair ZX81 to 1TB on my newest laptop!

So, my twitchy little fingers have been urging electrons to light up screens for years and I never really get bored with the results.  I wear the appellation of Gadget Freak with something approaching pride.

I still remember in the far off days of computer exclusiveness, I would be asked as I paraded my Psion before technology confounded eyes, “But how does it work?  Show us!”  And I would press a few buttons and behold, staring eyes and open mouths agape in wonder.

I remember too, in those early days going to a ‘Computer Workshop’ and when I got there the instructor in charge of the group said, “Thank God you’ve come Stephen!  You take this side of the room and I’ll see to the other!”  My plaintive whines about the fact that I had come to be part of the group not an instructor was ignored as our joint class lurched into action.

“Stephen, it’s not working!” said one of the members.  “I’ve tried pressing this and this and this and nothing happens.”  And it shows you how long ago this little group was, that my masterly assessment of the problem led to a swift resolution when the computer was actually switched on at the mains and the screen blazed into life - to gasps of amazed thankfulness!

Such innocent days are long past.  We are all thumbs efficient now and are laid back in our utilization of complex machinery that we could not have dreamed of only a few years back.

So, to keep me up and running as far as my mobile phone (A Yotaphone, two faced Russian built affair) I decided to take a power pack with me to feed the insatiable electric hunger of the thing.  I powered up the phone; I powered up the as yet unused power pack - I was good to go and to survive a New Year’s Family Celebration which would go on well past midnight!

Sure enough my phone’s cravings became more than I could accommodate and so I plugged in the pack and waited for the phone to be sated.  And nothing happened.  And continued not to happen while the phone descended into darkness.  In desperation I was reduced to writing in my little notebook that I always carry with me.

I assumed that the failure of the power pack was another example of sleek, svelte packaging over hard utility.  Little bigger than a credit card with built in short leads, I always thought it was too good to be true.  And to be absolutely honest I only bought it because it looked shiny and neat - and useful of course.  And it didn’t work.  Another waste of money.  Another gadget bites the dust.

Today, I idly wondered whether I had fully powered up the pack, perhaps things would have been different if I had left it on charge a little longer.  I decided to give it an extra boost and plugged a mini usb into the slot on the edge of the ‘card’ and noticed as I did so a tiny and almost imperceptible button with the words ‘On/Off’ incised unobtrusively next to it.  I pressed it experimentally and a little line of blue lights appeared on the face of the ‘card’; I plugged it into my phone and the little lightning sign appeared in the empty battery symbol indicating that power was being transferred.

In spite of my years of working out how to set up digital watches without the instructions; my apprenticeship through Sinclair, Amstrad, Mac, HP, and a wealth of other logos; my dedication to gadgets, no matter how marginally useful they might be - I had been defeated by a simple on-off button.

How are the mighty fallen.  Vanitas, vanitas etc etc.

I start 2018 chastened by the thought that complexity and sophistication starts with something simple.   

I will indeed, think on these things!

New Life!

Praise be!  Behold, my telephone hath been restored unto me!

The language used for that last sentence fits the sense of renewed faith that comes with being plugged into whatever electronic systems I have been missing over the Days of Isolation through which I have had to live.  And please do not say that the 38 euro thing that I bought to ‘tide me over’ did anything so much.  To be fair I am astonished by just how much such a cheap phone was able to accomplish, but it wasn’t my faithful old Yotaphone.

It was given back to me this morning; some sort of chip having been replaced and it is now in full working order.  Except . . . .

Except, while the phone works, some things are missing.  Like all the apps that I added and the photos stored (I assumed) somewhere or other on the sim or in the cloud, somewhere, anywhere.

It’s a bit like beginning to walk again.  You progress step by step.  You have your basic phone and a lot of space on the main page where lots of little icons used to lurk.  Some of the replacements were easy to decide on: Reverso (my translation app); The Guardian (once a Guardian reader always a Guardian reader); Radio 4 (to question the need for this one argues that you wouldn’t understand the answer and that you were a poltroon); WhatsApp (people send things and they expect me to read them, and I do try, honestly!).  Other apps will be found when I need them, or to put it in the way that Toni described it, “You’ll get them when you find they aren’t there!”  Which is almost philosophical and probably counts for a lot of the time spent on computers as we try and find what isn’t there.

In the bad old days (I now understand that means anything over 5 years ago), no, the really bad old days when there was no internet, no wi-fi and virtually not on-board memory, you really did have to search for things that you thought that you had done, but you had made a tiny mistake in the file name or file type or where you put it and it was well and truly gone.  Like the books in the British Library that I was told had a shelf number as their identifying place in the system, which meant that if a book was replaced incorrectly then there was a real chance that it would never be found again, except by pure chance!  Sometimes it felt with early computers that, whatever we were told about the cold logic of our machines, they were actually motivated by a malevolent maliciousness that works ceaselessly against us.

So with my revived phone.  It felt as if things had been intentionally hidden.  For example the photographs I had taken.  On the photo app on the phone there were no ‘taken’ photographs, all the photos had gone.  Somewhere.  And, sure enough, over the next few hours, I found a photo, and then a whole slew of photos emerge from the electronic mists and retake their places.  They are there, but I don’t seem to be able to access them from the camera.  That too will change, I’m sure.

And, a I’ve been typing, I have realized that there is another app that I can’t do without, that of Kindle.  This is the app that uses the second face of my phone, so that I can read easily in black and white, and in the sunshine too.  And even as I type it is syncing my information and all my books are now only a touch away!

Everyone should go through the trauma of ‘losing’ their phone, if only for the delight and satisfaction in ‘restoring’ a life!