IT'S A DAD'S LIFE:When my link to cyberspace is broken, I panic, writes Adam Brophy
I GOT THE internet pretty early, like really got it. I let my room in a houseshare in London by advertising it online back in 1996. The replies I got implied a sort of shared interest in a secret; it was a geek let back then.
That same year a friend and I went to meet a bunch of guys (it was always guys) who were building websites from a ramshackle Victorian tenement building in Shoreditch. I used the word "techie" and they got stroppy.
They were Oxbridge philosophy grads and believed they were opening the world up to a broader way of thought. It didn't hurt that they were coining it while alternating between writing code and sucking on a bong.
My buddy seemed to understand what they were doing and he wanted a piece of it. I had a pretty good idea of what was going on, but was blagging the back story. I knew I could let my room on the net but had no idea how the thing worked.
That suited me, in the same way that knowing my car can go fast without ever figuring out the mechanics of the combustion engine suits me.
But my ignorance meant never getting to grips with the nuts and bolts of the new world, just its shiny front end. Rather than ride the early web rollercoaster to fabulous wealth I committed myself to an online middle-age based around poker, property and used cars. In other words, I spend online (time and money) but never receive.
The upshot of this is that when my link to cyberspace is broken it feels as if my lungs have collapsed. Panic sets in because I don't know how to fix it myself.
When my car sits down it's the same thing, but I never promoted myself as mechanically minded. I did, once upon a time, consider myself cyber sophisticated. No more.
I've had one of those "closer to my mum and dad's" way of thinking than them baggy trouser kids' weeks. My computer had a tiff with my broadband box and the stubborn toe rags couldn't find a way to work out their differences.
As a result, I spent some time speaking to help desk technicians who sounded like they had all been born post Italia 90.
Their advice amounted to, in the main, "Turn it off and start it up again." Having attempted that level of technical tomfoolery myself, I became impatient, wanting only for my typing box to type again and the typed word be free to move to another's typing thingummy receiver.
We tried various combinations of the old off and on routine. Nothing worked, and there are a lot of possible permutations in the switching off and rebooting of monitor, printer, modem and PC.
I was galled, both at my over-reliance on technology and at how I've become so inept when faced with its inevitable shortcomings.
The elder knew I was mad. She knew because I was bug-eyed and had no idea where to sit, because when I get stressed I sit in front of the internet and price used luxury marque cars on eBay. She came in and offered to help.
"Have you tried turning it off and starting it up again?" she asked. I informed her that I had, but immediately considered getting her a job on a multinational's help desk.
The younger came in, noted me slumped in front of a blank screen and climbed into my lap. "Show me pictures o' when I was a baby," she demanded. She's very old now, three, and needs to be reminded of the past.
"I can't honey, everything's broken. Maybe we'll look at a real photo album?
"Boken? No," she says and reaches for the power button. "Ten it off, den ten it on."
The elder joined back in, all of us in consternation in front of this blank, black box. She asks have I checked the plugs, the leads, the phone lines? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They tell me not to get ratty, they're just trying to help.
"Daddy, your puter is boken. Now you can play with us!" realises the younger. "We can do mummies and daddies and you can be de daddy. Yay!"
She takes me by the hand and leads me into the playroom, sits me down. "I an de mummy. She is de baby. I tell her what to do and you sit der and drink tea." I am handed a plastic cup of cloudy bathroom water. "When she is bold you do a shout at her."
Mmm, maybe I should leave the car pricing more often and concentrate on my own PR, the tea might improve.
