Monday column: When technology let me down

When things go wrong, they come one after another. It usually happens when you are looking for a short cut. It is a product of restlessness and impatience. High expectation and perhaps taking chance on luck puts you in all sorts of troubles.

I guess we rely a lot on technological wonders to sort out some of our problems. It is true that the speed and accuracy of technology makes our life easy. At times too easy that we do very little. You don't deliver business letters but email them. There are no shift gears in the car and the rice cooker takes care of the main dish.

But what about if one or two technological tools stop working? My phone went silent just two days after coming back from holiday. I could not use the email and of course texting was out of question, too. I forgot to settle the bills. I rushed to pay them but was told it would take a couple of hours to get connected.

 I became desperate man. It was as if my life line snapped under my feet. The privilege of the electronics servant that I took for granted was temporarily removed at the crucial time.

However, I had a vehicle waiting outside my house. I rushed out and sped to the road with the intention of meeting my contacts to convey my personal message. Hardly a kilometre away, I was stopped by a policeman because I forgot to put my seatbelt. I wasted a quarter of an hour while the lawman satisfied bureaucratic procedures. When I was ready to race down the road again, I found that the technology I was driving needed attention.

I pulled at the petrol pump and wasted precious more moments. Back to the road, in my anxiety to get to my destination in time, another modern equipment conspired against me.  I failed to notice the radar until I passed it, twenty kilometres per hour above the speed limit. It was then I realised that was going to be an expensive trip.

At last, I arrived at the office block and sighed with relief that there was ample parking. I whipped out my briefcase and ran down the tarmac pavement and nearly bumped into a truck as I went round a corner. 

I delivered my reports but that did not save me an hour of my time and police fines. On my way back, I thought I should relax a bit since the worst was over. As I was going down the stairs, my mobile started to ring. You can imagine my annoyance. If I had exercised a little patience and controlled the panic then I would have done my heart a favour.

I looked at my watch. Just over two hours had gone since I jumped blindly into the car. Because I was much more relaxed now, I realised that the recipients of those reports could have waited a little bit longer for the reconnection to be done. That was not all. A rude surprise was waiting for me when I opened the car door.

A tail of the parking ticket was blowing in the wind as the rest of it snuggled under the wipers. In my hurry to make it in time, I forgot to pay at the machine. Another technological instrument that let me down. But I shrugged it off and did something I should have done a couple of hours before. I calmly untangled the ticket and drove away looking for a hot cup of cappuccino. That one technology that would never let anyone down.