techno-hell

I always used to be contemptuous of hardware developers' endless quest for a black box that would do absolutely everything. Now I've acquired an iPhone (only to ensure that for PhD purposes I have a voice recorder and video camera always to hand, honestly) I am reluctantly coming round to the view that at least that makes three fewer machines to go wrong.

I thought that starting a PhD would involve long quiet hours in a library leafing through the tomes I'd always meant to read. My first proper talk with John, my main supervisor (we've known each other for years but now he has the unfortunate task of keeping me on the straight and narrow) revealed some of the things I was about to encounter such as EndNote and DropBox (was it The Guardian's makeover as the Guardian or was it EastEnders that started all this?) and propelled me towards getting the iPhone and a Mac laptop.

Still reeling from paying out my first year's fees and what seemed like incredible quantities of other stuff including a far higher incidence of ready meals given our once-again frantic lifestyle, I opted for a second-hand MacBook. Now it seems that every single attempt I make to get anywhere near my PhD work is frustrated by the learning curve I now face. It's not just steep, it's curling over my head like those nightmare enormous waves that loom up just when you thought you'd had a lucky escape from what you temporarily thought was the biggest wave you'd ever seen. Struggling through giant databases with names like ERIC and PsychInfo, each with subtly different interfaces, endlessly forgetting where I last saved what I laughably call "my research", constantly clicking CANCEL when I meant to click GO on the sadistically counter-intuitive university portal login, floundering in deep water with my surfboard out of reach, I stagger home only to discover that my MacBook doesn't recognise my iPhone, iTunes has decided that the only music I will ever need is Carmina Burana, and to top it all the damned DVD player won't work.

I realise that the reason for this last is that some long-vanished Virgin engineer (imagine describing that job to people at parties) has connected it up the wrong way and that we are now condemned to scrabbling through mountains of paper to find what our parents' generation always referred to (but why?) as "the book of words" for the DVD player, and to shuffling about on our knees in the squirming pile of dusty cables behind the ever-temperamental flat screen TV (yeah great, when it agrees to switch on, like about 50% of the time).

Sometimes I like to fantasise about rewriting my favourite SF novels (Ian M. Banks, if you want to know) with some creative touches of life on Earth now: drones fly smack into walls; somebody connects up the wrong power cables down in the bowels of the GSV, etc. Of course Banks' riposte would be that all these machines can mend themselves without disrupting the flow of the story. The only SF parody on the lines I'm thinking is Woody Allen's jibe at "goddam cheap Japanese flying packs" in Sleeper though I daresay there are lots more.

More often though I am liable to break down and cry. I sat stony-faced through War Horse but a software malfunction can have me weeping buckets. I think that today I'll give up on trying to get my invaluable, unrepeatable research videos into my laptop and leaf quietly through Vygotsky instead. He may have been persecuted by Stalin but at least he didn't have to defer to Steve Jobs.