NOTHING DOING

I only popped upstairs the other evening to trawl through the thirty odd saved telephone messages that my mother had left over the course of the last couple of weeks to find the latest one which contained her latest shopping requirements. She’d phoned (again) whilst I was in the bath and, in the course of retrieving that message, the previous one from earlier in the day when I was out had been saved and was now at the bottom of a very long list to retrieve.

Anyway, the upstairs phone is near the pens and notepads and is of the push button type so it made sense to go up there to check them.

Whilst I was at it, the internet had been playing up earlier so I thought that I’d better boot up the old computer and have a quick mooch around and see what was what that evening. In the intervening hours, someone had left me a message so I had to respond to that, and someone else had published a new entry on their blog, so I had to read that and add my own undesired observations, and then I went to visit my usual cycle of website suspects and found that the internet still wasn’t working quite right as I tried transferring one lot of files to another place with little luck.

Fairly shortly after that I found that I had got myself into a loop of cycling around the same five websites waiting for this, trying to work out why I couldn’t do that, and generally bobbing back and forth whilst contributing absolutely nothing new to any of them.

I looked at the clock in the corner of my screen.

Over an hour of my precious personal evening time had passed, and, apart from listing a few groceries onto an adhesive note, I had achieved absolutely nothing.

I hadn’t even managed to compose a few pithy and unremarkable sentences for this pile of nonsense.

Nothing at all of any consequence had been achieved by that hour of my life spent in thrall to the electronic puppet master that I’m sitting in front of once again as I type this.

I seriously began to wonder if, because so much time had seemingly passed with so little being achieved, I had actually fallen asleep at the keyboard. This would, I felt, at least have made that hour have had some kind of worthwhile purpose but, no. Even catching up on a few precious winks had eluded me. I had simply been wasting my time, busily doing nothing, as another hour of my life ticked pointlessly away.

If I’m incredibly lucky, and live longer than my dad to, say, about seventy, my life will have consisted of about 611,520 hours, which sounds a lot at first, even though people might nowadays consider a £611,520 lottery win to be somewhat middling (although still a useful sum nonetheless…). Once you start slicing off the hours you spend doing this and that, however, like sitting in car parks waiting, standing around in supermarket queues, or traffic jams, and doing the washing up, or housework, or working for someone else, not no mention all those nights spent in front of the telly, all of those hours spent asleep, or on the loo, and all those other mornings where you didn’t feel like getting up, or just felt “a bit bored”, the number of useful hours in that number starts diminishing rapidly. But I still felt the need to squander one of those precious hours pootling about doing nothing very much on the old internet.

I mean I could have been putting my energy towards some much better purpose, something life changing that could have made the whole planet a nicer, better place for all of us…

Although…

Now I come to think of it, I suspect that I’m really not the kind of person who’s ever going to come up with an idea as radical or important as that. After all, some days it’s all I can do to get around to doing the washing up… and, of course, I’m hardly the kind of person to rally together some people to support some cause or other. I mean… It’s me… I’d struggle to fill a party in a phone box and even if I did manage to organise one, I’m unlikely to even turn up myself…

I suppose I’m going to have to face it. One day in the not too distant future, I’m going to be on the brink of shuffling off this mortal coil and I’m really going to get a twinge of guilt and a pang of regret over all those wasted hours, and really wish that I’d used them more wisely. Yup! There’ll be no “Je ne regret rien” nonsense going on as I kark it, I’ll be absolutely livid.

With myself, mostly.

Meanwhile, there’s always another entry in the great unraveling saga of pointlessness to blog about…

That should waste some more of my precious time…

With that in mind, I’ve not really got much to say about the passing of Steve Jobs apart from the usual platitudes about it being terribly sad and so forth, although it does strike me that building a 360 billion dollar company out of something you made in a garage, whilst impressive in itself, did rather mean that much of his almost brutally short seeming 56 years must have been spent sitting in offices and boardrooms, which, when the time comes, suddenly seems like an extraordinarily sad way to spend your few years. It might even be suggested by the odd unworthy blogger that spending your life inventing new and exciting ways for other people to waste theirs, might not be the most impressive legacy to leave behind you. It all, I suspect, depends upon your own perspective, but I am pretty sure that my job as I know it might never have existed without Apple, so I guess I should give thanks for that every single day.

Nevertheless, I’ve rarely thought of corporate success as being “success” the way I would define it, and yet I still fall into the trap of prioritising my work over so many other, much more important things in the great scheme, so it’s hardly fair for me to comment further, other than to say that I know he will be missed by many and was, I suspect, one of the few who deserved the label “genius” who will live in our lifetime.