Things I’d change to cope with time being so precious
Original article date: May 1998
Won the lottery?
No, nor have I, but in common with most of the population I’ve wondered what I’d do if it happened. Actually, I reckon the answers are divided into two key areas.
Firstly, there are the things I’d change to cope with the fact that time was now the most precious thing of all, so I would spend whatever it took to save it. Secondly, there are the things I’d do because I always wanted to do them.
Here then are the things I’d like to have which would save me time.
1. Something in my car which could read my new email to me as I drove to work. And allow me to verbally mark ones for further attention. Hands free.
2. A special phone to cope with annoying menu systems (usually belonging to people who I actually want to buy things from). This would allow me to record a brief message saying what I want to talk about, then the phone would automatically call the company, wait until a real operator arrives at the end of the menu, and then repeat my message to them so they get the message and call me back.
3. A mobile phone which, when it receives an incoming call from a number it doesn’t know, says at the end of the call “Would you like that number added to your address book?” and when I say yes, it asks me for the name and nickname (which I speak) and someone at the exchange types the data in and it’s added to my phone automatically.
4. A car that not only knows its service status, but recognises my patterns of work and decides one day that I’ll be parked here for another three hours, calls the service guy, gives a GPS location and a password, then when the guy arrives, unlocks the door so he can service the car. Or MOT it. (What, and your Morris Minor doesn’t do this already? Ed)
5. A small number of pre-programmed buttons on the steering wheel such as:
“Passing Tesco in five mins, do we need anything?” (which would call home), or
“Pint of the usual Dave, I’ll be there in five minutes” (which would initiate a message to my local).
6. A standardised international laptop so all I need to travel with a computer is a removeable hard drive, allowing me to use it on trains, planes, in hotels etc. which all have the rest of the PC fitted and waiting for me.
7. A standardised international pint of the usual so I know how drunk I am
8. A hands-free kebab
9. All junk mail sent to me electronically, allowing me to apply certain filters and not disappear in a mountain of paper. With a hard coded block on double glazing and new Visa cards.
10. Oh, and un-loseable keys.
And now, the things I’ve always wanted to do, which I could if I won the lottery, and hang the consequences.
1. Use one of those PLC ‘digital sound modules’ and build a machine control system that responded to error signals with sound samples of Father Jack (if you don’t know, you don’t want to Ed).
2. Tell the client from hell what I really think
3. Turn down work
4. Mount a ‘fitness for purpose’ legal challenge against the supplier of any operating system that gives me serious grief.
5. Take a course in any technology that currently makes me feel stupid because I don’t understand it. Examples include Windows programming, marketing hype, how to explain fuzzy logic without any arm-waving whatsoever, and how you can charge all that money for a BA tail fin graphic. Oh, and cricket.
6. Make a list where the numbering wasn’t consecutive.
10. Move to Tibet and escape all the Millennium bug hype forever.
May 1998