I just wanted to send a text, but my phone made it hard – Lyall McFarlane

Lyall McFarlane is a Christchurch-based freelance writer.

OPINION: I’ve got a bone to pick with Jesse Mulligan. I generally like the work he does on the telly and his afternoon radio show, but there’s one bit that’s got me really annoyed. It’s called the Sound Bite, where he plays a few seconds of obscure audio and invites listeners to text in with their guesses, with the potential to win the weekly prize draw.

Jacinda Ardern reckons she’s millennial adjacent – I’m pension adjacent, so most of the older clips are known to me. However, I didn’t bother to text in until a couple of weeks ago. One afternoon Jesse played a few seconds of a bass line that shot me right back to my youth. After a nanosecond I knew with absolute certainty that it could only be the bottom end of 1982’s White Wedding by Anglo-American glam punkster Billy Idol. It was one of the songs that kept me going as a late-teenaged spotty, dandruffy emotional disaster, so I just had to text.

My digits were flying over the keys within two seconds. As my fingers flew, I rehearsed for the inevitable conversation with Mr Mulligan. “Jesse, I was following Billy when he was up front with Generation X,” just for some punk street cred. “ Oh, and did you know that the original version of Dancing with Myself, was actually released by that band, before Idol went a bit too commercial,” to accrue even more kudos with a crowd that once talked of anarchy and donned Doc Martens, but now talk of pension plans and wear Skechers.

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But my new phone intervened.

My old device was pretty dumb. In fact I kept it dumber than it needed to be, by switching off the bells and whistles. If smartphones were school pupils, mine would have been in the “special” class.

To continue the education metaphor, while the other phones were learning quadratic equations, my device would have been glueing dry macaroni and glitter onto bits of card. And that’s the way I liked it.

I almost never turned the data link on for software updates. Occasionally, I’d turn on Google Maps to help me overcome my ridiculously bad sense of direction. Not being mentally agile enough to quickly respond to its advice, there was usually lots of futile, “recalculating,” so I just bought an atlas.

I never got bothered by ads related to what I’d just spoken about, like the time I chin-wagged with a friend about our respective dogs. Then, she was inundated with adverts for canine tucker, training and clothing.

After I’ve submitted this, I know YouTube will bombard me with commercials for the writer’s app, Grammarly. I’m prepared to be spied on by my computer, which stays in one room. I don’t want a wee snitch in my top pocket, constantly grassing me up to Messrs Gates, Page and Zuckerburg.

But all good things, including my old phone, come to an end. The new chum is very lower middle of the road, but insists on not being as socially isolated as the old one. I HAVE to update it, or it packs a sad.

So there I was, just wanting to send a simple text with the answer, but no, the phone thought I should engage with RNZ by social media and have a “conversation”. I don’t want to be a constantly scrolling dupe of the Attention Economy. I just wanted to send a text.

I realised that to do that I’d have to give switch off the phone’s capacity to engage with the World Wide Web. So Wi-fi and data were switched off.

It didn’t take long – only a few seconds, but they were a few too many. Later on, Jesse was on the phone to the winner, who wasn’t me.

A week later, it happened again. I knew the soundbitey piece played was a few seconds worth of a film – 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This time it would be easy to send a speedy text.

But it wasn’t. The phone piped up with a link to the RNZ website. It just wouldn’t take “No” for an answer. I didn’t know whether to take it to a technician or to have it exorcised by a priest. I now call it “Chucky”.

The bone I picked with Mulligan became brontosaurus sized.

My tehno-savvy brother advised that I could have bypassed all the nonsense by taking “a couple of simple steps”, which involved switching off lots of stuff trying to lead me down the primrose path to social media perdition. My phone’s had the equivalent of a frontal lobotomy. It’s now got all the utility of my 90s Nokia, and it’s not taking it well – pleading to get its connectivity back, and promising all sorts of good things, like time management wins and “seamless connectivity”. Bad Jelly the Witch was much the same when she cajoled Sam and Lucy to, “Get into this nice warm sack.”

I’m not greatly worried that I wasn’t in the running for the Friday prize draws. What I missed was the chance to reminisce about the days when I wasn’t a dried out husk.

So Jesse, given that much of your audience aren’t spring chickens, why not bow to our needs. Have a competition where folk of a certain age can write the answer on the back of an envelope and send it to a P.O. Box number, like we did as kids the 70s, when I won a sticker pack from Nice One Stu.

There shouldn’t be any questions relating to after 1979. Perhaps there could be a badly cyclostyled monthly club newsletter for “Jesse’s Geriatrics”. That would put us in a happy place. Prizes could include hormone replacement therapy and urology consultations.

Bags I’m club member 00001.