oh no!… my mobile phone’s been cut-off… I shall have to resort to old-school, smoke signals, drumming, town criers, two tin cans tied together with an inordinately long piece of string… it’s interesting I even got a text from them, aka the mobile phone provider, aka, incompetence-central, saying they were unable to contact me to discuss it, well what do they expect, they’re the ones who locked it… oh dear, oh dear, the manifold joys and ease with which the modern world makes one’s life so simple and convenient freeing up flagons of free time for me to do all these other things with I couldn’t do before… like battle with phone companies and baffle my way out of one technological glitch after another…… I happen to know of a very, very, very high bridge from which I can envisage my phone taking a flying bungee jump… without the bungee…… it’s like the time I was on the phone, landline of course, to my internet provider to work out why my broadband was down and they told me to check online…. doh!…… oh how quickly technology overrides initiative becoming the default setting, but I suppose it’s always happened, this urge to constantly distance ourselves from the actual thing we want to do, to remove the tactile, the kinaesthetic, the experiential…. remote-controlled tractors, combine harvesters, drones, instead of being out there in the field with shire horses actually handling, touching, smelling… preferring absence to presence… there’s a Led Zeppelin album called ‘Presence’ which curiously has absence as a focus, the absence of an object that’s there but isn’t…… a bit like wifi I suppose, there but isn’t…… the internet, absence in presence… mobile phone signals, seemingly mostly absent than present…… mind you I suppose that’s what the dead are, absent presence, except with them you don’t need a vague/ unintelligible/ bloody-minded/ half-hearted/ condescending/ hopelessly unqualified (delete as appropriate, all or none at all) ‘customer service’ (and I use the term advisedly) numpty knowing less than you on the other end of a phone for whom you’ve waited what felt like forty days and forty nights to get through too while being subjected to all-too often ill-advised and questionable music choices… on repeat!… I ask you…… actually, what was I saying?…. doesn’t matter now, anyway, phones working again following a plethora of bizarre, out of sync, nonsensical text messages which I am to duly ignore, which is bizarre as if I am to ignore them then why send them?…… yet more puzzling puzzles to puzzle…… today I will be mostly… drinking coffee from a trough…… … …
© 2018 robert greig
