The agony of dying gadgets

It’s hard, being a technophobe today. The condition is defined as ‘a fear, dislike or avoidance of new technology’, which in slow-moving times — involving a popular shift from the fountain pen to the rollerball, say — should be manageable, but electronic change is coming so fast now that one is rarely without an encroaching sense of panic.

We technophobes are often compelled to use technology, of course, and we can certainly sniff the magic of its portal into a world of limitless information. And so we pick up rudimentary skills, painstakingly and with a grudging suspicion, and our second-greatest fear becomes that this old, now-familiar technology will suddenly break down. When it does, our feelings contain the crude ingredients of grief: nostalgia, anger, abandonment and terror.

My personal meltdown began, recently, with the malfunctioning of the Blackberry Curve, a mobile telephone supplied to me many years ago by the office where I then worked.