Rage Against The Machine

I’m always jealous of people who say they only need six hours sleep every night. I’m also envious of anyone who says they need eight hours or even ten, because my answer when someone asks how many hours sleep I need is always “one more”.

I am hopeless at getting out of bed in the morning and was tempted at Christmas to get one of these bed shaker alarms. The idea is that, as well as the alarm ringing, a vibrator under your pillow goes off shaking you awake. I’m naturally distrustful of things that vibrate in the bedroom but I borrowed one of these iLuv clocks from a pal. At seven a.m. the alarm rang, and then the shaking started and entered my dreams, so that in my dopey state I was sure I was in an earthquake. I dozily took the proper course of action during a ground tremor and decided to sleep through the whole event.

So Technology has yet to come up with the alarm clock that works for me. I will probably have to employ a butler to throw water in my face, set the bed on fire and then threaten to kill all my chocolate reindeer, one by one, until I get up.

But last week in Las Vegas a new alarm was unveiled at the Consumer Electronics show, and this one won’t let me off the hook. I can’t wait for it and I just hope Technology doesn’t let me down again. The new alarm goes off in the morning at the appointed time and won’t stop until you switch it off. So far so normal, except this one has wheels and goes for a random spin around your bedroom while it’s ringing so that you have to get up, find it, and then switch it off.

As the Vegas show proved, Technology moves at an incredible pace. I was watching an old episode of Friends this week and Rachel and Ross were talking to each other on mobile ‘phones which were probably cutting edge when the show was recorded but, by today’s standards, looked to be roughly the size of Bradford.

Don’t get me wrong, with an anatomy like mine, the drive to make people appreciate ever smaller things is something I welcome and I love technology that works, and makes life better. I just don’t blindly buy every new trend. The iPad, for instance, seems just a toy or, at best, a giant mobile ‘phone that doesn’t actually make calls, Twitter seems designed for observations on life that I’d be embarrassed to find in a fortune cookie, and 3D television has as much chance of succeeding as Justin Bieber has of me ever buying a concert ticket. And don’t get me started on DAB radio, in fact no one seems able to get the public started on DAB radio anyway, do they?

For some people, technology takes the place of proper social interaction, hence the reason that Facebook is so popular and why people deliberately take wrong turnings in their car so that the Sat Nav will talk to them. For some guys I know it’s the only time in the day any woman will speak to them.

I call this reliance on the latest “must have” gadget the Device Vice.

My kids are addicted to Facebook and texts, and their thank you letters for Christmas presents were mainly sent by email this year. But this blind following of technology can get silly. My oldest daughter, Annalie, was babysitting this week and didn’t ring us to let us know when the couple would be back and she would get home. We called her on their landline and she apologised saying her mobile phone had run out of power. “So why didn’t you call us on the landline?” we asked. The answer was that she’d forgotten it even existed. And I’m not making this up.

Some technology is about as popular as a Dennis Waterman album and those early adopters must feel really, really stupid now. Remember HD DVD? How about Beanz, the internet currency that flopped? Or Smart Appliances, fridges that would automatically order eggs and milk when they ran low? What about Virtual Reality, Speech Recognition or GPS collars for dogs? All about as useless as acne in a beauty salon.

However, the new alarm clock on wheels really excites me and if it works then I’ll confidently say that I’m back in love with technology. But for the moment, like Rachel and Ross, we’re on a break.