Opinion

Anita Robinson: Trying to get a handle on my new smartphone leaves me no wiser

Anita Robinson
Anita Robinson Anita Robinson

The cursed thing declares an incoming call with a raucous blarge of orchestral music that goes on and on while I dredge fruitlessly through the debris in the bottom of my handbag looking for the offending device, conscious of disapproving glances from people around me.

I find it, open it and punch it a couple of times. It goes dark and sullenly silent. How I hate it. How it hates me. My beloved fifteen-year-old Nokia is no more. Dead as mutton. (Sad face emoji.) In its place is this black-faced slab which occasionally throws up a vast array of meaningless symbols and fleetingly, a keyboard that disappears as soon as I breathe on it. The new iPhone and I are not a match made in Heaven.

I may have intimated over the years in this column that I am completely technologically inept. I don’t know or want to know how anything electronic works. Nor was it ever necessary that I should. Heating, lighting, household appliances and electronic devices were the exclusive province of the late Loving Spouse. Let out alone, he’d come home with an iron the size of a Cunard liner or a vacuum-cleaner cum carpet-shampoo-er far too heavy for me to operate.

Men cannot resist a multi-tasking device – which, I suppose is an appropriate metaphor for a wife. For me a cursory glance through the Book of Destructions to identify their basic function was always sufficient – with Himself as reliable back-up for inevitable crises. The policy had two significant flaws, viz. I learned nothing and now I’m heartily sorry. Five years after his demise the washing machine is of pensionable age, shimmying and shuddering violently across the futility room floor in a tragic parody of a bad Argentinian tango on ‘Strictly’. I have no idea how to defrost its equally elderly contemporary fridge-freezer, so I just eat all the perishables, open the doors and build a barricade of basins and bath towels (my own fast-track version of global warming.) Both appliances need replacing.

I know women who cruise the aisles of electrical stores for pleasure, craving the latest high-performance models. I visit rarely, out of grudging necessity, seeking only an exact replica of the derelict device I’ve got so I don’t have to change my ways. Life’s too short for any more steep learning curves. Assistants bury their heads in paperwork when they see me coming and send out an adolescent part-timer to deal with Mrs Notoriously Difficult (aka, me.) He/she parrots a five-minute spiel while jabbing random buttons showing off all the appliance’s party tricks, delivered in terms so technically abstruse they might as well be a foreign language. Naturally, I have neglected to measure the space available to accommodate the prospective purchase, so I’ll have to make a second visit. Sometimes I can’t be bothered, thinking, “sit it out till the current one breaks down.”

But all that’s by the bye. The new iPhone is an unsolicited gift from my service provider after a revision of my contract. A nice young man rang to say they were alarmed at the size of my phone bill. It was a very pleasant transaction and worked out considerably cheaper. Subsequently, numberless well-meaning friends have taken me patiently through the basics. None of it has stuck. In despair I visited the service provider’s local office. Forty-five humiliating tutorial minutes later I emerged no wiser. I flung the device from me.

It was while surreptitiously reading an abandoned copy of the Daily Mail in the doctor’s waiting-room I came upon an advertisement that may change my life. “A Low Tech Solution for Mobile Phone Problems,” announced the headline. “An end to getting frustrated with your Smartphone – in plain English, free from jargon and gobbledygook”. Fortunately there was a man nearby with a cough like tearing sheets. I synchronized my stealthy ripping out of the page with his throaty spasms. I have ordered the definitive guide for the confused and inept. There is hope for the hopeless after all……