Scenes from a sci-fi film, based on a true story:
Scene 1: Interior – 24 hour service station. Garishly lit, and suffused with green.
It’s a BP Connect – one of those big ones that also has a café and only just stops short of being a supermarket that also sells petrol. It’s 10 o’clock at night.
There are 5 cars at the pumps and another 7 cars parked in front of the store itself. Behind the counter are 2 staff members. There are another 2 out the back and 1 on the forecourt. That’s 5 staff. There are 4 tills.
In the queue are 4 people, laden with late night junk food. There are 3 more people browsing the shelves who look ready to bring their armloads of chocolate biscuits and diet coke up to the counter. The man behind the till smiles apologetically as the person at the front of the queue approaches.
The sign goes up: ‘Counter closed’.
Nobody is served for 5 full minutes as the ‘shift changeover takes place’. The entire computer system shuts down – all tills simultaneously – and apparently all service stops as a result. All stand quietly as this happens. Nobody moves. It’s as if the people, with the machines, have gone into standby mode.
Cut to…
Scene 2: Interior – a suburban newspaper office.
There is a frantic panic. All hands on deck. Phones are ringing, people are shouting, paper is flying everywhere. There has been a major disaster – and its not one that’ll get reported. The deadline is tomorrow and there has been a catastrophic computer crash. All classified ads have been lost, all copy must be retyped, all type re-set, all layout all laid out again. A woman is sitting at her desk, holding back angry tears. Another is openly sobbing. A man in his early fifties is yelling obscenities at nobody in particular. A cadet reporter is trying to look busy, but is actually just flailing uselessly. He is in the way and is made aware of this in brutal fashion by an older editor running equally uselessly from one office to another. The radio that usually chirps away in the background all day has been unceremoniously switched off because it was getting on everyone’s wick.
Through the window, we can see what are clearly beings of a higher intelligence pedalling past on their bikes. One is singing along to a cassette of Sgt Peppers on the walkman.
Throughout, no blood is shed… but the cyclists aside, tolerance is plainly being stretched…
Give or take a little licence, that’s what went on today: epic poetry of our time on one hand, a commercial for Luddism on the other. That amount of disruption – particularly in that suburban newspaper office – would have required a fire that burnt the building to the ground, or at the very least, outright and malicious sabotage – if we hadn’t been dealing with computers.
Now I like computers fine – but there’s a certain robustness that analogue technologies have. I’m quite fond of that.
