Mindy Hammond
Throw away your instruction manuals. Our columnist gets to grips with technology
As you may be aware, I am not what you might call a technology wizard, but then again, neither am I technology-phobic. Like most people, I can work a computer and a mobile phone, I am even pretty good on TV remotes and several times have managed to sift through all the programming and system set-up gobbledygook to solve problems on all of them, but there are some pieces of 21st-century equipment which leave me close to tears.
I’m still not entirely sure why so many of us volunteer to have talking speaker Alexa in our homes (who apparently spies on us continuously) or Siri on our phones (unless it’s to insult Siri or ask daft questions) – surely there’s nothing wrong with writing a ‘to do’ list instead of telling the electric voice?
Our home may have an Alexa, but she’s only plugged into the wall when we fancy listening to some tunes, with no opportunity to get involved in our daily lives.
I wonder whether our appalling internet speed has caused the information superhighway to take a detour past us over the last few years? That has to be the case, otherwise I’ve been dropped into a new dimension where the weird stuff which floats about in the ether is threatening to take control.
When I unwrapped a plug-in internet signal extender to speed up that whirring cog “waiting to connect to internet” icon, which seems to live on my laptop screen, I was devastated to find I had to connect via an app before it would work. I’m sorry, what?
This app can control your lights, your TV and can probably make a start on the ironing – I wish we’d met years ago. Another magical property of the app is its ability to control the central heating and it isn’t alone in this. It seems we all must have central heating we can control remotely – we have to have an app so that when we are about to board the plane on our way back from our Caribbean holiday, we can turn our home temperature up to 30 degrees and believe we are still in Barbados by the time we’re watching Corrie. And I had always supposed, if you’re wealthy enough to make your home so technologically advanced, you probably are holidaying in Barbados and it all makes perfect sense.
But here’s the thing, our renovated house in the Lake District has been replumbed and received a new heating system. Last week, I went up to do some work on the place with my friend Lou. We hadn’t seen each other for ages and the five-hour journey was a great way to catch up before we set about sorting some of the furnishings – opening a roomful of delivery boxes and finally sitting down with a glass of wine and a pizza.
However, as dusk fell, we noticed a nip in the air. No problem, there were LED thermostats in several locations. All we needed to do was turn up the temperature on the thermostats and the radiators and underfloor heating would warm up in seconds. Except the thermostats wouldn’t allow us to turn up the temperature beyond 16 degrees. We searched for an instruction manual and found a four-inch square booklet (what happened to the A4 pamphlet which used to come with anything so serious as a central heating system?). We struggled to read the tiny print and stood squinting through our glasses. We followed the instructions three times and nothing happened. We tried it on every control (even the big, chunky control panel, which was surely the ‘master’) but, still, no joy.
I checked there was oil in the tank, that the hot water was actually hot, but after an hour of frustration we lit the log burner in the sitting room and watched a film snuggled under Lou’s padded coat, before each scampering to our beds and burrowing under our duvets.
The next day the builders arrived and, after stabbing a control panel three times with his index finger, Chris had kicked the heating into action in 30 seconds. We asked him to film himself doing it and wrote instructions on a piece of paper – nothing he did was in the flaming instruction manual!
Is it really just me? I know heating controls need to have countless menus in order to be set up initially, but once they’re up and running, why oh why do we need a smorgasbord of flashing LED icons? Can’t we just have an on/off switch, a timer and that nice spinny temperature wheel on the wall that makes a comforting click when the heating comes on?
Perhaps it was simply the universe telling Lou and me we weren’t meant to be there – we probably should have been in Barbados…