Playtimes HK Magazine Winter Issue 2018/2019 | Page 102

last word
Modern life is so annoying!
A
Nury Vittachi finds that, sometimes, it's the
simple things in life that are the best
boy raised by wolves in a forest says he misses his old
life. Living as a wolf cub in a Spanish wilderness was
much less stressful than modern life among humans,
Marcos Rodríguez Pantoja told the BBC.
Journalists expressed surprise at his declaration, but I totally
get his point. Last week my book ran out of batteries! I know
Socrates is looking down at me from heaven and laughing,
waving his “always on” scroll.
Meanwhile, at home, my child is outraged. Why? “My snacks
are so crunchy I can’t hear the TV,” she complains, furious.
This is LITERALLY the worst thing that has ever happened
to this child. I mean, how is she going to cope with real life,
during which massively tragic things happen, like they forget to
put mayo in your sandwich, a devastating incident that totally
spoiled this columnist’s day shortly before writing this column?
I told her that in my day the only TV was a window facing a
brick wall and the only snacks our fingers. She said brick walls
were probably better than what was on TV these days and
she’s probably right.
Back at work, I was moaning about my dead e-book when
a colleague told me about another tech problem. The trend
spreading across Asia is to have a Roomba machine, a wheeled
disk that quietly vacuums your floors in the middle of the night.
Unfortunately no one told these machines that a) Koreans
and Japanese people often sleep on thin mattresses on the
floor; and b) sucking up hair on the floor is not a good thing
to do if it is still attached to the human’s head. On one recent
occasion, firefighters had to be called to remove a ravenous
Roomba vacuum cleaner from its Korean owner’s head.
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East Asian owners are junking their cleaning robots for
superior technology: broomsticks.
There’s definitely a backlash against tech stuff happening.
Police officers in the Indian state of Odisha recently
demonstrated how they use pigeons to get messages across
a vast portion of the state in just 20 minutes. During floods and
power cuts the police pigeon service is the only functioning
communications system.
So basically, if their conversations are anything like mine, you
send a bird across the state with your message, such as “LOL”
and forty minutes later, you get the bird back with a message
saying “LMAO”.
Oh well, at least no one can complain about
information overload.
A colleague showed me an angry text that had been sent
by the teenage child of a friend of his from an aircraft recently.
“There’s so much leg room in business class that I can barely
reach the touch screen TV,” she complained.
What suffering! How our hearts bleed for her — as we sit
in economy class seats with our noses mere millimeters away
from the seat in front.
Uh-oh. I would canvass readers, contributors and colleagues
for more examples to fill this column with, but I’m writing this by
talking into my phone – which is about to run out of batteries.
So I have to stop here.
Socrates! Stop laughing!
Nury welcomes your comments and ideas at his Facebook
page: www.facebook.com/nury.vittachi