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Progress is a beautiful thing.  It’s a beautiful thing that seems to encourage enormous levels of idiocy in people.

You know when you’re queuing up in a supermarket and you put your shopping on the conveyor belt?  You know the little plastic divider things that keep your shopping separated from the person in front’s shopping and the person behind’s shopping?  Can anyone remember how we survived the supermarket experience before these little inventions?

I’ll tell you how.  We used common sense.  Fucking common fucking sense.  You put an obvious gap between your shopping and the person in front, and you made sure that the cashier stopped scanning when they got to your shopping.  Easy.

Why then do people refuse to put their shopping on the conveyor belt without the aid of a foot-long plastic prism to prevent their shopping becoming irreconcilably confused with the shopping in front?  Specifically, why do they shoot you accusing looks and huff and tut and sigh when you don’t put the little divider thing after your shopping?  Use your fucking common sense; like people used to.  I hate those little plastic shopping dividers, because people are so stupid they rely on them and can’t function without them.

And next time you arrive at a pedestrian crossing, perhaps you might like to do something we used to call LOOKING LEFT AND RIGHT before pressing the button, crossing the road anyway, and causing a car a quarter of a mile away to have to stop in thirty second’s time at an empty crossing.

A friend of mine once went to Birmingham.  On her way back to Nottingham she decided to put her Sat Nav in charge.  She followed the Sat Nav’s directions for a while before stopping, thinking something wasn’t quite right.  She’d blindly followed the directions and ended up in North Fucking Wales.  She driven 110 miles in the wrong direction and ended up in another country before she decided to engage her brain. 

You see, this is what really shits me about progress and technology; they cause people to stop using their tiny stupid fucking brains.  The blame is probably equally apportionable between the people and the technology, but seeing as the technology itself is far from stupid I can only come to the conclusion that people are inherently moronic beings.

So it was with a sense of sad inevitability that last week I finally caved in and became an iPhone owner.  I’ve wanted one for a long time; I just never wanted to be one of those people, and I certainly don’t want to end up relying on technology to guide me through my every waking moment.

The tragic news is that after seven days of owning an iPhone I have no idea how I managed to survive twenty-nine and a quarter years without one.  What did I do last time I was lying in bed with a hangover and needed to find out the time of the next train to London?  How did I ever manage to buy a coffee without opening the Starbucks iPhone app and finding directions to the nearest store?  What did I ever do on the loo at work before I had Freecell to play?  Actually, try and forget that last one.

How the fuck did any of us do anything before mobile phones, let alone iPhones?  This is how technology works; it makes you wonder how you ever managed to survive without it, when you actually survived without it just fine.  The completely perverse and counter-intuitive thing is that the more technology we have, the stupider we get.  Technology will inevitably revolt and kill us all.

In the meantime as long as I’m only a click away from finding my nearest Starbucks I’m quite happy.