One fine morning last week, when I took my mobile phone to make an UPI payment at a shop counter, the screen greeted me with a strange message: Welcome to One UI 6.1. While I couldn’t make head or tail of it, the next line was more baffling. ‘Get the most out of your Galaxy with advanced intelligence features,’ it said by giving me a singular option to ‘Explore.’ As a typical technologically challenged person, I often find myself at odds with my smartphone when it throws up challenges like that at unsuspecting moments. But that morning it was beyond my powers to get away from the situation as the screen did not give me any option other than ‘explore’ and I had no time to waste searching for the ‘back’ symbol to exit.
Hurriedly, I took my wallet and got away from the shop after paying by cash, which actually is my most favourite mode of transacting business that I have given up these days for some strange reason by opting for modern alternatives like the debit card or the UPI, despite my inherent clumsiness in keying in code numbers. But the screen still welcomed me to ‘One UI 6.1’ and will not let me do anything else with the phone. Based on my previous experiences in dealing with the recalcitrant mobile phone, I restarted the device to only find the same ‘welcome’ on screen with no options to do anything that I normally use the phone for.
Anyway I thought I knew of another way to wean my phone from its overnight romantic hook up with some unknown feature that refuses to let it go and come my way to do my bidding. So, I switched it off and then switched it on hoping to see my familiar cluttered page that will enable me to make a call or send a message or check out the social media updates or open the e-mail or take a photograph or whatever. But that morning the phone surprised me by showing the same ‘welcome’ page. Running out of options, I decided to play along with it and tapped the ‘Explore’ button though I had no idea as to where it might lead to.
While I was well aware of the dangers lurking in such unknown digital alleys, I explored the unfamiliar road as I saw that as the only way out of the cul de sac that I was stuck in for no mistake of mine. But I found myself in another digital wilderness, having lost my way and losing hope on coming out of the daunting page to do my usual businesses with the phone and realized that a digital elf was holding at the scruff of my collar and egging me to ‘enhance communication’ or ‘unleash productivity’ or ‘create epic images’ by following its orders. It offered the following options: Sign in with Google or email or phone or sign in with QR code.
Okay I tried to do it with the phone number but failed. At one point when it asked for my name, I typed them in and a red bordered warning came against the use of special characters. I am aware of what special characters are. They are signs like hashtags or at the rate of. But my names, both first and last, did not have any such character. So I kept staring at the phone to see if any extra character had crept in. Anyway I thought I shall give it a try and remove the capitals in my names and viola that was what that elf has meant. To write my name fully in lower case was something that brought memories of the primary school days when the use of capital letters for pronouns was driven into our heads.
Arguing with a digital elf that too when it was holding you by the jugular is not a wise thing. So I gave up and decided to seek help. I thought of the man who sold me the smartphone and also remembered that I have his number, from which I regularly get updates in WhatsApp of new models that had arrived at his store. But how do I make the call when the stuck up device will not let me even look into the address book. So I decided to wait for him to open his showroom at 10 am. As I handed over the phone, he gave it to his assistant and he tapped the screen repeatedly, say some 10 times (no, I did not count) and lo and behold my screen was back in action.
What that nightmarish episode, brought about by the stuck up that was resolved like a child’s play by the Silicon Valley type salesman with absolute contempt for the technologically challenged lowbrow user, revealed was the way we (at least I) have been caught in a trap. Isn’t it ironic that the palm sized contraption that came into our lives just over a quarter century ago to help us speak to people not around or send them crypt messages has today morphed into a hydra having complete grip over mankind. That we have let the phone carry out a wide range of tasks performed earlier in different locations, with different people, at different times has given it an inevitability in our lives, leading to its present tyranny.
