I have this recurring fantasy about a young woman. She approaches me in the street, clipboard in hand. "Excuse me, sir," she says civilly. "I'm conducting a survey on behalf of Eircom [or it may be Esat or Nokia or whoever]. May I ask if you have a mobile phone?"
"No," I reply urbanely. "I'm fortunate enough not to need to have one of those." She starts back, her pupils dilate, and a fleck of foam appears at the corner of her mouth. "But . . . but how do you keep in touch with your friends? How do you keep up with your friends who do have mobile phones? Don't you have any friends?"
"I have a fixed phone at home," I explain patiently, flicking a speck of dust from the impeccable Mechelen lace at my cuff, "and I have access to a fixed phone in my place of work. If my friends don't find me at one, they will probably find me at the other. And there is the emergency fallback of phone boxes in the public thoroughfare, though I haven't used one of those since 1984.
"Telecom sent me a couple of complimentary 10-unit callcards quite a while ago. When it was still Telecom, in fact. They still repose, virginal, in my hand-tooled morocco leather wallet. I really ought to send them to the St Vincent de Paul.
Private life
"That apart, I have no wish to have my private conversations, even one side of them, eavesdropped on by the Great Unwashed passing in the street, or sitting nearby on the omnibus, or on the DART electric railway. One's private life is private. However innocuous, it is not for the ears of the hoi polloi."
But by then she is putting as much distance between herself and me as possible, glancing fearfully over her shoulder the while.
In an alternative version of the fantasy, the response to the same question is: "No, I don't have one of those. I grew out of toys, oh, several years ago now."
"The mobile phone is not a toy," the young woman will say severely.
"Twelve-year-old schoolgirls have them," I riposte. "They're a toy. Increasing numbers of adults are succumbing to contagious infantilism. Why, I have even seen adults riding on those aluminium scooters. Admittedly, it was in Switzerland."
And she will stalk off, filing me mentally under "harmless crank", just as the supermarket checkout girls do when I spurn their plastic bags and produce my own big reusable one.
Another thing. I went to buy a microwave oven recently. In the showroom, I recoiled in terror from an intimidating range of models with control panels like that on a Challenger space vehicle - great arrays of switches, elaborate key-pads, digital dials. The only one I could understand had just three knobs: one to select Microwave or Grill or Microwave and Grill; one for temperature; and one for timing. So I bought it. What more could a white man want?
CD player
I have this CD player. I can play it in Random mode (plays the tracks on a CD in random order); in Full Random (plays the tracks on up to five CDs in random order); in Spiral (plays the first track on up to five CDs in sequence, then the second track, then the third, and so on). I can programme the thing to play just the tracks I want to hear, and I can programme it not to play the tracks I don't want to hear.
What is going on here? I will tell you. The mantra of high technology these days is: If it can be done, it will be done, even though it doesn't need to be done. Dreary little pointy-heads in ill-fitting white lab coats are justifying their continued existence by constantly pushing the envelope of technological possibility and turning out gizmos, widgets and doo-hickeys we didn't even know we wanted, much less needed.
But that, of course, is no problem. Into action swings the marketing and promotion juggernaut, to con the more feeble-minded among us that if we don't have these infernal new engines of theirs we are condemned to spiritually, morally and socially bankrupt lives.
Remember those miraculous new credit-card-sized pocket calculators, the ones you had to work with a biro, because the keys were so small? Do you imagine that the boffins truly believed we needed them that small? Of course not. A postcard-sized one would slip into your pocket quite handily.
No, what was going on there was this: the raw material for microprocessors is silicon wafer, an extremely expensive substance. So it paid the boffins to miniaturise to the max. And, hey presto!, microscopic calculators, easy to lose, biro not supplied.
As he readily acknowledged, Thomas Alva Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park, was anything but a wizard, conjuring discoveries out of the air. "Discovery is not invention," he said, making the distinction. "A discovery is more or less in the nature of an accident."
"Social inventor"
Dubbing himself a "social inventor" he worked to entirely the converse agenda from today's eggheads. He looked round and said to himself (I paraphrase): "What would people like to have that they don't already have? I think they would like to have a machine of some sort on which to listen to music, repeatedly, in the comfort of their own home.
"Go to it, fellows," he exhorted his 15-strong team of techies in New Jersey. And lo! the phonograph was invented. If it can be done, it will be done, so long as it appears that the people want it to be done.
And the people rejoiced. They did not say: "Tom, old fruit, what the Sam Hill is this thing you're foisting on us? Make us something useful." What they did say was: "Great stuff, Tom, just the ticket. Keep up the good work. Now what we want next is . . . ." Tom, you see, had the right idea. And his head wasn't pointed.