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None of them works particularly well. Some of them don’t work at all. I just carry them around, hoping that one day they will make sense to somebody, perhaps the kind of man who can build a car out of five empty Lilt cans and a ballpoint.
I don’t know many women whose gadgets work well. Unless they are aged 25 or under, or an astronaut by trade or their children have bullied them into techie-consciousness, the women I know still cling defensively to their Filofaxes and rotary phones.
At home they are queens of faulty television sets and never-to-be-set DVD recorders; at work they are the only people who do not — cannot — text each other obscene visual jokes on their 3G phones. These are the people least likely to have betrayed Kate Moss.
I do like the idea of technology, though. I like the idea of having an alarm clock that wakes me up in the morning and a contacts book that doesn’t have a hernia because it once rained into my handbag. I like the idea of a gadget that doesn’t have the constitution of a 19th-century victim of TB and which is not intentionally programmed to die on its owner once Christmas is over. One of my friends tells me that it is rumoured that the life-expectancy of an iPod is exactly 13 months (the guarantee covers the first 12), but I like the idea of never again having to spend an hour and a half wandering lost around the Lea Valley at 2am after an argument because my mobile phone, the worst in the world, could not take being used as a missile.
I would like my gadgets to be sturdy and foolproof and to do their job not just adequately but heroically in any weather. On top of that I would like them to do other jobs like cleaning themselves, never breaking and disguising themselves as curtains when a burglar breaks in. Most of all I would like them to do what no human being has ever done for me before: make me organised.
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