Birvidik

I should never have married a younger woman. Now she's decided she wants an iPhone.

"That shouldn't be a problem (other than financially)" I thought. "I'll look it up on the internet I'm pretty computerate. I'm down with the kids."

Hah!

Technological progress has leapfrogged over me and leapt into the future, pausing just long enough to turn round and give me a two fingered salute on the way. Motor cars were the advance guard. There was a time when I could open the bonnet, look inside and identify each component and what it did. Not only that, but I could take the whole thing apart, service and repair every bit (even down to manually regrinding valves) and then put it all back together. Sometimes it even worked again.

Not now. Even if I finally manage to work out how to lift the bonnet of a modern car I'm no longer confronted with a comforting array of hoses and wires, carburettors, radiators, water pumps, gearbox, rocker boxes and camshafts. All I can see now is a sinister, hermetically sealed, grey box looking for all the world as if it's just escaped from the set of the Death Star. Frequently it will be plastered with warning stickers, designed specifically for anachronisms like me, which shout "WARNING - NO USER SERVICEABLE PARTS INSIDE!" in blindingly fluorescent upper case. These are usually followed by another screaming "DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT USING THAT SCREWDRIVER!"

At first sight this would lead one to suspect that repairing a modern car requires an array of highly sophisticated tools, a Tardis and a PhD in quantum mechanics. Nothing could be further from the truth. All it takes is a spotty YTS trainee, a bottom of the range laptop and a courier service. Diagnosis is made by connecting an umbilical between the engine and the laptop, which will then chunter away for a while, during which time the car takes on a life of its own. The engine starts and stops. Lights flash on and off, wipers make a few desultory swipes across the windscreen, the suspension pumps up and down a couple of times and the horn plays 'Colonel Bogie' in B flat. Eventually everything settles down again and the laptop flashes up a message along the lines of "Front nearside ABS sensor failure. Remove component trs(ii)/27/xplt#/@$$ and replace. To order part press f12" Our spotty trainee then hits f12 which sends a message to the main depot and the courier service ordering part trs(ii)/27/xplt#/@$$. Then he tells you to come back on Thursday.

Come Thursday he connects the laptop again and punches in a highly encrypted code. This is a sort of electronic screwdriver or tyre lever and the sinister grey box opens as if by magic to reveal a matrix of smaller hermetically sealed grey boxes. He unplugs one of these and replaces it with its clone. Then he slaps a bill for £457:23 + VAT in your hand and waves you goodbye.

The same thing, only worse, has happened with computers themselves. I never could take a computer apart and fix it, but I had a rough idea how it worked. I knew what RAM, BIOS and a load of other acronyms were and what they did. I could use spreadsheets. Hell, I could even set up a database in Access. So, with just a slightly swaggering smile I winked at Liz and confidently typed 'iPhone' into google.

It was gibberish. What is it with these people - why can't they give things sensible names? WTF is 'Android'? And why does he like ice cream? What am I supposed to make of 'CDMA model: CDMA EV-DO Rev. A (800, 1900 MHz)' or '802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi (802.11n 2.4GHz only)'?

And then, apparently, you can get something called 'Apps'. It turns out that 'Apps' is not, as I first suspected, an unpleasant suppurating skin condition, but a contraction of 'applications' which turned out to be little mini programs. There are thousands of these things. Five hundred thousand to be precise. Well, there were yesterday. Christ knows how many there'll be tomorrow.

Among them are such useful little items as 'Where's my iPhone?'. If you've lost your bloody iPhone, how are you going to use the app to find it? There's another one that shouts at you until you've done a hundred push ups. Or you can wind up some cartoon birds until they're incandescent with rage and then poke them around a screen. Why? What you really want are useful things - apps that will serve deep seated human needs. Apps such as 'Where are my bloody car keys?' or how about 'What did I come in here for?' I'll tell you what would be a really good app - one where you pointed the phone's camera at the couple you think you recognise and it tells you their names and where you last met. The 'Who the hell are you?' app. This could be used in combination with 'Just how mind numbingly boring is this jerk?' to give you a chance to hide under the table or glug down a litre of hemlock before they get to you and pester you about whether you've found Jesus yet. "Afraid not - sorry. Where did you last leave him?"

A few more apps like that would increase the sum of human happiness. Unlike those that enable you to send yet another photograph of your bloody cat to the one person on the planet who's interested and about four thousand others who would rather stick needles in their eyes than open another of your irritating attachments.

I'm going back to clay tablets and an abacus.