Melissa Kite Melissa Kite

Real life | 28 May 2015

All the words we once knew will be replaced by those our smartphones suggest

issue 30 May 2015

Andy the tech guy looked delighted when I told him I had done the stupidest thing ever. He is one of those whizz kids who hungers for interestingly impossible technological problems. The more obscure the devastation I have wrought to a gadget the better he likes it. He was very excited when I blew the brains out of my laptop by opening 27 windows, then slamming the lid down without closing any of them. On that occasion, he ran a programme called a ‘Defraggler’, which I think must be like a defibrillator for laptops. He licked his lips as I sat down in front of him with the smashed BlackBerry.

‘This is hideously ruined, even by my standards,’ I said, placing the apparently dead phone in front of him.

Not only had I dropped it on the stone floor and smashed it, I explained, I then locked myself out of it and out of the spare BlackBerry I keep in a drawer, by attempting to swap over the Sim card in a botched rescue operation.

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