If the Wi-fi cafe barista had read my mind he'd have called the police. I was seething. The reason? I'd ordered muesli and a hot chocolate, which meant I was committed to spending at least seven minutes at his establishment, but the Wi-fi network was down.
'Something has happened,' the barista drawled then solemnly restarted the master computer, which failed to solve the problem. I decided that, for wasting my time, the barista had to die. Eventually, because I did not want to wind up in jail, I necked my drink and the cereal, shot the barista a daggered look then moved on. Later, waiting in a one-man queue at the library while an assistant poring over a screen distractedly tried to explain the way to the drinking fountain, I grew homicidal again.
My behaviour suggests I have been assimilated into instant gratification culture, which is driven by the immediacy of texting, messaging, e-mail, 'CrackBerries' and a sense of entitlement expressed by truculence towards any inconvenience. According to Larry Rosen, co-author of the book TechnoStress, we no longer have time to listen to people talk slowly - 'or talk, period'. As an interloper in the Twitchspeed Generation ('digital natives' born after 1974), I remember when that ponderous communication tool, the letter, held sway. But I can no longer be bothered to chart my ideas in ink then wearily rectify mistakes by scrubbing out words (manual labour for sad people). The only person I know who writes letters is a Jesuit priest reluctant to repudiate paper missives because he sees them as more human communiques than electronic messages. I could never take his cue because I sympathise too much with the frustration recounted by Attention Deficit Disorder expert and the author of CrazyBusy, Edward M. Hallowell, in his classic account of a modern encounter with a rotary phone.
'Yet as I started to dial, got angry, and impatience flamed within me because on this phone I had to wait for the rotor to wind back to its starting point after each number,' Hallowell writes. 'It was so slow!
'In addition, it made an irritating screeching sound as it retraced its cycle, like a rusty metal drawer stuck on its runners: 5 ...4 ... 2 ... 6 ... I could have entered the entire number on a touch-tone phone
in the time it took me to dial just one number on this obsolete contraption. Not to mention how much faster I could have done it with speed dial had I been able to use my cell phone.'
