Drained

My feelings towards modern technology have taken a downward turn. I awoke yesterday morning to two text messages I'd received overnight. This is notable considering I never get messages unless EE decide they suddenly want to offer me tickets to a gig, stand-up show or other miscellaneous event I'm really not interested in. It's got to the point where feeling that little vibration in my pocket invokes a sense of anger and weariness within me, where normal people may feel elation.

Considering the barrage of marketing messages I have to contend with attack me during daylight hours, I was mildly surprised to see that two things had tried to alert me between the hours of 11pm and 6am. My slowly waking mind raced (well, as much as a slowly waking mind can race) wondering which of my friends or family had felt the urgency to get my immediate attention at such an unspeakable time.

My blurrier-than-normal eyes and drained-from-early-starts mind did their best to work together in the early morning dawnlight and focus their dwindling energies on the phone display. I'd soon discovered that the two messages had arrived within an hour of each other, both from an automated number. The first read something along the lines of thus:

You've now used 80% of your monthly data allowance. Whoa, steady on there, and such.

Less than an hour later, something like this was sent:

You've now used up all of your monthly data allowance. Why not give us more money so you can keep fuelling that excessive downloading habit you seem to have there? After all, your next month's allowance doesn't start for another couple of weeks. Ha!

I found the content of these message to be quite odd. Not because they'd were written like that. They weren't, that was just me capturing the tone of smugness. What I found odd was that I hardly use much mobile data, if ever. I don't trust it enough. Data usage is difficult to measure whilst you're out and about dealing with other real world events. And I like measuring. I like knowing. It took me years to finally agree to using a monthly tariff instead of pay-as-you-go because I liked that I could hear a robotic lady voice telling me I had a specific amount left to spend. I could do the maths and plan my future phone use accordingly. But data is difficult to measure in spontaneous moments and I tend not to use it often.

In my quest for answers, I managed to discover that a single app on the phone had gone rogue and, much like an obnoxious teenager pirating every film and TV show that ever existed during the small hours of darkness, stayed up all night inexplicably abusing that connection in the background.

In the background.

Background downloading.

And not even anything useful. Just a browser I'd closed from the screen but hadn't properly closed down and exited the entire app, probably refreshing itself every couple of minutes so the ad banner could keep changing and marketing lots of stuff to me, which I couldn't see anyway because (a) it was off the screen, and (b) I was asleep.

Never mind the fact that I usually do all I can to prevent background apps running and eating data. I know it happens and I like to think myself cleverer than the evil technology makers and a savvy saver to boot. However, in my one moment of long-week-with-little-sleep induced tiredness, the devil got into my phone and rendered it useless for the next two weeks or so.

Of course, it's not useless, it's still a phone that can make calls and receive text messages. Heck, it can even use Wi-Fi to access the web. It just can't get data whilst on the go. Trouble is that's what phones do these days and without such an important feature it might as well be considered useless. Imagine, for example, that all spoons were integrated with a pencil in the handle. Now imagine that pencil bit breaks and all of a sudden you resent the spoon for its inability to make notes and the fact that the only thing it's good for any more is eating soup.

Having had the allowed data mercilessly leached from the device totally behind my consciousness - my over-processed, under-rested consciousness - I've been forced to come to the conclusion that the planet Earth is, in fact, an ageless vampire, constantly sucking the life out of everything and not really giving much of a damn. All the while, in this world-as-uncaring-vampire scenario, I've been playing the role of the emotionless and expressionless girl who can't act but still wins awards anyway. I so desperately want to believe the world actually has the potential to be a good place and I also hope that the world will love me in return, only to realise that the cold, harsh world doesn't really have the capacity to love me and is only really interested in draining me of my life-force and mobile data, most likely through the big vein in my neck.

Sadly, that analogy doesn't totally fit. I never win awards for having an unchanging, mopey face.