Columnist Joe Bennett says he feels adrift in a technological ocean. Photo / 123rf
He is young, fresh-faced, tall, entrepreneurial and at ease with technology. I’ve christened him My Antithesis. And I’ve hired him.
I am not alone in doing so. Though My Antithesis has lived all his life in the 21st century he has built up a base of clients who lived most of their lives in the 20th. He mediates between those clients and their electronic devices. He finds retirement villages especially fertile hunting grounds. Once one resident has hired him, his name goes round a village faster than Covid.
Part of it is his bedside manner. He dresses neatly and, however he may feel about his clients and their faiblesse, he speaks deferentially. He reassures them that it is not a crime to be all at sea. Nor is it weakness to summon a lifeboat.
Of course, there are plenty of older people who are at ease with electronics. They tend to be smug. “Oh, come on,” they say to people like me who find all screens rebarbative, “it’s child’s play.” And for corroboration they point to children playing, if hunching over a phone alone is classed as playing.
My Antithesis takes a different approach. He doesn’t berate his clients. Nor does he try to demystify the technology. Instead he domesticates it, corrals it, renders it tame enough for us to handle. Should it rewild, he’s only a phone call away, and $80 an hour.
I have hired him to overhaul the gear on which I’m typing this. It has been together for so long that in my mind it has become a living organism I do not dare to touch. To disconnect a part would be to destroy the whole. In short, I am afraid.
But My Antithesis is not in the least afraid. He will break all the threads of connection. He will reduce the beast to its constituent organs – modem, screen, printer, keyboard, mouse, and the box of tricks that sits at my feet and is the brain within the body electronic. He will replace that brain, and anything else that looks a little tired, and he will transfer my messy old memory to my bright new brain with a couple of million emails, and he will clean things up and eliminate glitches and put it all back together in a way that when I get back in charge of the body he promises that I will barely notice a thing.
And since my current computer set-up was installed maybe 15 years ago I am hoping that this installation will be the last one of my life. That it will see me out or gaga.
Over the course of 15 years the computer has developed idiosyncrasies that I have learned to cope with. For example, the symbol @ has gone walkabout. As I explained to My Antithesis when he came round to discuss what he would do – like a pre-op visit from the surgeon – the @ has swapped places on the keyboard with the “. How that could have happened I cannot begin to guess. My mind was formed in a mechanical age. With a typewriter that sort of thing can’t happen.
My Antithesis smiled. “That should be easily fixed,” he said, and laid young hands on the mouse and keyboard and in seconds he was into the innards, like a surgeon slicing open a belly with a few nerveless strokes of the scalpel. He performed a bewildering series of actions on the screen, things flashing on and off faster than I could register them. And even as he did so My Antithesis was able to carry on a conversation.
And what we talked about was my email address. It is a fossil. I got it from a little start-up company in the early 1990s. The start-up was swallowed by another company, and that by another, and that eventually by 2degrees, but the email address somehow survived every new ingestion. It is the only address I’ve ever had. It is joe@caverock.net.nz
“Ditch it,” said My Antithesis. With a new Gmail address he could co-ordinate things so that my devices would be synchronised and he would ensure that all emails to my old address were rerouted to my new one and …
“Please,” I said, “may I keep it?”
My Antithesis smiled. He all but patted my head. He understood that I felt adrift in a technological ocean and it was all I had to cling to. “We’ll keep it,” he said. “I’ll make it work.” The future belongs to My Antithesis.