Where is the gentleman who invented the "snooze" function on alarm clocks? I`d either like to shake his hand or smack him.
There is something quite satisfying in lying in bed, knowing you can go back to sleep for the infinitesimal period of time allotted to you by your awakening device. There is also something quite destructive in the conviction that the "snooze" period is so insignificant that its repeated usage will not affect your final time to destination. Nonetheless, it is a little piece of technology that has changed the waking patterns of people the world over.
There are many technologies that have done just this. Not the mind-boggling, life-changing "I don`t know how I ever lived without the Internet" sort, but rather the smaller, insidious electronic tricks. These technical sleights of hand that have altered our behaviour in minuscule ways encounter no resistance, as their function is sensible and the change is of no apparent consequence.
Demisting car windows is now a breeze. Whereas, in the distant past, car owners used to have to crawl around the interior of their vehicle with a soggy scrap of filthy cloth and try to restore transparency to their journey, now a mere tinkering with a couple of switches on the dashboard grants us near instant visibility.
These technical sleights of hand that have altered our behaviour in minuscule ways encounter no resistance.
Georgina Guedes, journalist, ITWeb
Remember during the droughts of the mid-1980s, when South Africans were encouraged to put bricks in their toilet cisterns in an attempt to reduce the ludicrous volumes of water being flushed away daily in the disposal of personal waste? A decade or so later, Europeans were forced to acknowledge that their seven-times recycled water was also in limited supply, and the dual-flush loo gained instant popularity as a way to curb the squandering of water. Now, the European population selects their flush intensity according to the amount of waste they have produced - a slight but consistent alteration in behaviour. Odd that no such device has found favour here. I guess it will take another serious drought before SA takes such a sensible step.
The flugelbinder, that little piece of plastic that holds together the ends of shoelaces, was a blessing. People no longer have to suck on the muddy, tattered shoelace ends to persuade them to form enough of a point to pass through the eyelets. Valuable minutes of frustration have been eliminated with the arrival of this device. Valuable minutes that we just don`t have after we`ve snoozed an hour of our morning away.
One so-called advancement, the arrival of which I haven`t applauded, is the geyser. In the past, hot water was heated in its pipe by a gas flame. This was cheaper than electricity, and produced endless streams of piping hot water. Some silly bugger had to come along and point out that this electricity thing that everyone was so enthusiastic about could perform the same function, on a grander scale but with limited results. All you have to do is install this hulking great geyser in your ceiling and you could have as much hot water as you liked for about half an hour. This is not a fantastic innovation for seven students sharing a digs and needing a hot shower to jolt them into wakefulness and out of hangover stupor (after 10 or so snooze functions have been utilised).
I had a lovely holiday on a farm once, where all seven of us sharing the house had one luxurious shower after the other without fear of having the hot water running out. This was until the farm owner pointed out to us that while the hot was omnipresent, the water certainly wasn`t, coming from rain storage barrels on the roof. Quick shared showers from thereon out. There`s no winning.
A colour-changing sticker has just been invented for fruit in supermarkets, designed to become darker as the fruit reaches its optimum ripeness. The idea behind this is that it will stop people from fondling the fruit quite so much in search of the perfect pear. This is where I draw the line. My behaviour will not be altered by a coloured, sticky piece of paper. It`s my right to squeeze the fruit to assess its readiness. The tactile joys of selecting succulent delicacies for my palate far outweigh any actual need to handle the fruit. In much the same way as bibliophiles such as me need to turn the pages of a book and feel its weight in our hands to know if we want to own it, I need to feel my fruit before I buy it.
So rise up and resist, I say. Don`t believe every invention presented to you is the newest and greatest innovation to change your life for the better. Where are all the Soda Streams today? Even if the behavioural change is a small one, assess it to see if you really want it. If enough people had stood up for their right to stagnate, we could all still have long hot showers, one after the other, and be even later for work than we became after the snooze function was invented.
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