Topping It Up

The top-up woman has an unctuous, hyper-friendly voice, and everything she says has an exclamation point on it. "Welcome to the XYZ mobile top up service!" she gushes. "If you wish to top up by voucher or credit card, press one!"

I've asked my daughter to be nearby because I didn't trust myself to do this alone. "Okay," she says from across the room, "what you have to do now is--"

But I've suddenly noticed that my phone's touch screen is blank. "There's no keyboard!" I cry. "How can I press one when there's no keyboard?"

"Please press one!" the lady repeats in her smarmy voice, blocking out what my daughter is trying to say.

"But how!" I yell at the phone and my daughter. "There's no keyboard!"

"Mom! There's no keyboard because they know you'll be holding your phone against your ear and you might accidentally press the wrong number!" She leaps up and takes my phone from me, presses a series of buttons and hands the phone back. "Now, when the lady tells you to press one, you just hit this button first -- are you looking? -- and your keyboard will pop up."

I glare at the phone. "It's intelligently done," my daughter adds. "They've thought of everything."

"Yeah? I didn't hear them saying anything about what buttons to push to make the keyboard return. That would be a lot more intelligent."

"They expect you to know," she says crisply. "It's lower common denominator stuff."

The top up lady is back. "Press one!" she gushes, a smile in her voice. I press one. A one lights up on my screen but nothing else happens.

"Did you press one?" my daughter asks, leaning forward.

"Yes, but it's not doing anything!"

"If you wish to pay by pre-paid voucher, press two!" the lady says. I picture her as a combination of my junior high school science teacher and Betty Crocker. I'll bet she's got polished fingernails, fire engine red lipstick, and ironed skirts.

I press two and my one becomes a twelve. This is so obviously an error, I hang up. "What did you do that for?" my daughter demands.

"My one became a twelve!"

"It wasn't a twelve!" my daughter groans, "it was a two next to a one!" She presses a bunch of buttons and we go through the whole rigmarole all over. "Now press one, then press two, and don't hang up!" she scolds.

This time, I press one, then press two. The woman doesn't react to this. She doesn't seem to know what a monumental thing I'm attempting to do here. Insensitively, she launches into a sales pitch about all the cool things I can do with her top-up service. "What's going on?" I whisper. "Shouldn't she tell me what to do next?"

"Mom, they've got you where they want you. You just have to be patient and hear her out," my daughter advises.

"This is ridiculous! I don't need to know about their stupid services, I need to top up my %$£"!@-ing phone!" I say, ready to launch into a full rant but my daughter holds out her hand to stop me. "Read me out the number NOW!" she shouts.

I read out the number in a stiff, clench-jawed voice. My daughter finishes punching in numbers and hands the phone back to me. "There you are, you've got £20 of credit on your phone now. Congratulations."

"It's so complicated!" I fume, staring at my phone. "I'll never be able to do that on my own!"

"I told Dad not to get you a touch screen," she hisses, throwing back her head and rolling her eyes. "They're not adult friendly!"

I take a deep, sustaining breath. "I changed your diapers," I tell her. "I had to remind you when you needed to blow your nose." My daughter flashes me a brief, pitying smile. "Which was all the time!" I can't resist adding.

"Come on, Mom," she says in her perky, helpful voice. "It's just a matter of practice. Topping up really isn't all that hard. Even Dad's learned how to do it."

"I used to have to take you to the toilet at night!" I say. "You used to beg me to!"

My daughter pats my knee in an infuriating way. "Mom, you're a perfectly competent human being. But you know you're seriously technically challenged."

Somewhere I've got a picture of her in a big, saggy diaper, with pumpkin all over her face. If I ever figure out the technology, I'm putting it on Facebook.

Rage Against The Machines

When I was sixteen, I had to take a multiple choice test on mechanical reasoning. This was a trial of a new exam, our class was told, and we should not worry about our results: the examining board just wanted to get an idea of our mechanical aptitude. There were diagrams and illustrations depicting screws, levers, rotating belts, pulleys, widgets and gizmos in various machines with arrows pointing up, down, clockwise and counter-clockwise.

I sweated blood over that exam. I chewed my pencil down to a stub and wracked my brains over every single question, finally turning it in with a sigh of relief.

When we got back our results, I immediately put my paper away so that no one would see it: my score was 15%. The principal actually called me into his office over it. He wasn't upset, he quickly assured me; I wasn't in trouble. But how could I get only 15% right? Had I felt ill when I took the test? I blushed and shook my head. Well then, maybe I'd gotten mixed up; maybe I'd thought number 3 was number 4, say, and just carried on, making mistake after mistake? I shrugged. Maybe. The principal stared at me and frowned; he couldn't figure it out. It wasn't statistically possible for someone to get only 15% right. And it was very strange, considering how good most of my other results were. In fact, he went on, I was the only student in the entire school with such a great discrepancy between verbal skills and mechanical ability.

I let the principal think that I might have gotten mixed up and filled in the wrong answers. It was easier than answering any more questions. The truth, I suspect, is that the part of my brain where mechanical reasoning skills should be isn't just a yawning, cavernous blank, it's a carnival house of distorted mirrors where everything is twisted up and put in the wrong way around. It's like I have some mechanical dyslexia that makes me muddle everything up. And it isn't dependable either. It's not as though left is right and right is left: some days counterclockwise is clockwise, but others it might be straight down in a corkscrew fashion.

Fortunately, life isn't all about machines. I've coped through pretty well with my disability. I've mastered the rudiments of bicycle, typewriter, copy machine -- even automobile. In my life-after-children, I've actually figured out how to use a mobile phone and a laptop. And I'm a teacher, not a mechanical engineer: as long as I can operate a Xerox, pop a video into a machine, produce sound on a CD player, print out worksheets on a computer, I'm home free, right?

If only! A few years back, our school purchased what they call smart boards. These are essentially huge vertical laptops with a king-sized pen (really a 'mouse') that the teacher can whisk all over the board, or screen, to do all sorts of clever things. No longer do you have to stand at the blackboard, patiently writing out sentences with an aching arm, breathing in chalk dust. No more filling up board markers with messy ink, no more brushing up against whiteboards and ruining your clothes.

But smart boards fill me with terror. When I use my own laptop, only my family is around to witness my screw ups. When you teach with a smart board, you've got a whole room full of kids to witness what you do. Kids, I might add, who are a lot more computer savvy than I am. Who are bound to sit there, watching me flounder about and think smart board, dumb teacher. And no matter what anyone tells me, I know that smart boards are not problem-free. Just as computers have made the writing process far more convenient, so do they bring a near-infinite supply of headaches. No one will convince me that smart boards aren't just the same: even technologically savvy teachers tell tales of breakdowns, blackouts, and weird glitches they can't figure out, and I've heard them. The same goes for using laptops with projectors and speakers: sure teachers can do plenty with them, but is it worth all the hassle? I remain unconvinced.

So I breathed a huge sigh of relief when the smart boards were assigned to a chosen few (i.e. young) teachers and we old-fashioned types were allowed to use the classrooms with whiteboards. I breathed another sigh of relief when I knew that I wouldn't have to teach the class that is using DVDs.

Then they went and changed our schedules. Why do they do that?

Last week, I was handed a DVD and a book. I was given a laptop, a projector, a pair of speakers, an extension cable, and a whole crap-load of nasty things to connect bits to other bits. A kindly colleague helped me haul it all down and showed me how to set up. It didn't work, so she got another teacher to help us. Between the two of them, they finally got it working while I watched in horrified bemusement.

The class was like something out of hell. Even with all the blinds closed and the lights off, it was too bright for us to see what was going on. We ended up having to project the image on the wall opposite the whiteboard, and as all the chairs are bolted down, students had to swivel around and strain their necks to see. The sound was distorted and out of sync with the actors' lips. Every time I tried to pause the DVD to ask a question, I ended up turning off the whole thing. There were so many twisty, tangly bits of cable running all over the place that I ended up tripping on one and disconnecting the entire system. A student knocked over the projector when he got up to put something in the bin. The only thing the class managed to learn was that their teacher can't operate a laptop without swearing, which segues nicely into the only vocabulary I ended up teaching them. Everybody went out of class saying death, hell and poison. And worse.

The second class was just as bad. The third class -- the third class I don't want to talk about.

I have two more months of this, three days a week. Hell couldn't be much worse.

A friend once told me about a colleague of hers who taught in Bhutan. His classroom was in a cave. There was one blackboard, a carefully hoarded supply of chalk, and clean drinking water. Sounds ideal, doesn't it?

I wonder if there are any openings?