JUST GIVE ME A PAIR OF PLIERS

WAY BACK IN PREHISTORIC DAYS,

Fred the caveman realised his stone axe had a lot of uses. Chopping wood or hunting dinosaurs all came easily with one single tool. Now, if he could only add some way of making fire, the whole thing would be perfect. And so the idea of the multitool was born.

Clearly predating the Swiss Army knife and the Leatherman by some distance, in the Fitzwilliam Museum is a Roman multitool harking back to between 201 and 300 AD. Today, the multitool fever has now so permeated our society that every electronic tablet/ phone/watch is peppered with different functionalities to the point of overflowing. Even car manufacturers are now so enamoured with multitoolness that they are not only converting vehicles into sport utility vehicles, but also plastering the inside with electronics to turn your vehicle into a moving entertainment/office/communications platform. Sitting in my car with my phone and American multitool on the belt I am now equipped with an entire office, multimedia hotspot and toolbox.

But is a multitool any good for even simple activities such as constructing a peanut butter and jam sandwich? Fact is, the saw on the multitool is too short. And too rough. And hard to hold comfortably. So out comes the trusty old bread knife.

And that multitool blade. Really too sharply tipped to nicely spread the butter and jam, it just gouges the bread and nothing moves around. Nope. The round-tipped eating knife is still king when you really need a job done.

So the old saying “Jack of all trades and master of none” holds true for multitools. The knife is never the one you need, the screwdrivers are off-centre and the handle will hurt your hand if you need to apply torque. The pliers are iffy and lose grip easily. Do not talk to me about spanners, hammers and other atrocities.

When it comes to buying tools, my grandfather taught me this: you get what you pay for. You buy a cheap screwdriver, it will break soon. And if you buy a multitool, you are in fact buying a set of cheap tools.

I used to own a cellphone that could only call and SMS. It was rugged and the battery lasted two weeks in a time when other phones barely crawled through a day. It was good at what it was supposed to do: making calls.

I now own a fancy smart everything and it still barely makes it through a day. And when the wind turns, the signal drops.

In the kitchen are a stove, a fridge and a sink. Yes, we could combine all of those into one glorious kitchen tool, but do we really want to? We need to realise that the happy multitool madness is occupying too much of our minds and return to a world of single purpose.

A few manufacturers are seeing the light. There is a slow creep back to single-purpose devices, even though some are disguised to resemble the multiple thingies. Fitness devices are such an example. GPS units are making a comeback. Stereo manufacturers are still with us. Wristwatches are making a glorious comeback.

And now operating systems are joining the fray.

In Android 5.0 is a function called screen pinning that allows you to temporarily lock a (multitool) phone into a single-application use. For longterm use, a lock task mode turns your smartphone into a true singlepurpose device.

There’s a growing single-purpose device movement like the steampunk movement, steering us away from the multitool to the olderfashioned ideas of one tool, one job.

In a recent issue of Popular Mechanics’ “Do it your way” section, a reader describes how to turn a smartphone multi- everything into a humble bedside alarm clock.

Why? Because mostly you just need one tool to do one job really well.