Technodiocy and An Irresponsible Parent

Today, I was supposed to write a piece lambasting a group of irresponsible individuals that I have observed. Work was sufficiently engaging and onerous that I had to delay that piece till now. And now, after riding the public transport back, I have found yet another group of irresponsible individuals that I feel I ought to lambast.

And so now you have the dubious honour of two rants for the price of one.

Let's begin with an assertion. I am a techie. Read my posts here from time to time, do a Google-stalk of me, read my personal domain and you ought to come to a similar conclusion soon enough. I like tech---I live tech, breathe tech and work on tech. Tech is my way of life, tech is my livelihood. There is no denying that I am no luddite by any means.

I own a smart phone. I own portable computers, several in fact, and work on powerful desktops and servers. I own some e-readers, and even a tablet. So I'm not exactly completely ignorant of the so-called mobile future.

Yet you don't see me lapsing into becoming a gorram phone zombie. I wasn't fully aware of just how bad the epidemic was until I started to look about me one day and realise that, to my horror, nearly 8 out of 10 people who were standing around me on a train or bus were burying their heads in one mobile device or another. That alone doesn't make them zombies of course---it is the modern day equivalent of say reading a paperback while on a transport.

What's infuriating is when people continue to use their mobile device while they are walking from one point to another that makes them phone zombies. It's ludicrous---a person, head all hunched up, staring at their tiny (or not so tiny) screens, sometimes plugged in with earphones, and just walkingshuffling through the streets, oblivious of the situation around them. I took to observing just what it was that could make a person thus engrossed, and from my unscientific observations, more than 7 out of 10 of them were on some kind of messaging system.

Messaging system. While walking. How much more ridiculous can it get? I mean, if they were walking and watching some silly video that they had downloaded (or doing comparative shopping, which is on a whole new level of idiocy that I will not rant about today), it's probably less laughable. But on a messenging system? I fail to see just why a conversation cannot be left alone for the [short] time it takes to get from one lousy point in SIN to another on foot.

And if you thought that I was just ranting about adults, think again. I don't really care much about adults---they should, by definition, have the good sense to pay attention to what they are doing after all---but school-going children. Let me emphasize that a bit: school-going children. Not on holiday, not over a weekend out in the streets. Early in the morning while they are getting their collective asses to school. That's how stupid it has gotten.

It's an old saying to be bitching about how the newer generations are never like the old, but in this case, I feel highly justified in thinking so. I mean, wow, just how much interesting things can a sub-eighteen-year-old say particularly when five sevenths of their week is already spent in school? I have friends all over the world (mostly congregated in the North American continent), and am a techie, but I don't even see the need to be staring at the chat screen all the damn time. And lest any one starts saying any nonsense, allow me to point out that my generation was among the first to make use of ``personalised'' messaging systems or IMs (not IRC which predates all these and is an example of the ``group chat'' that the sheeple are rediscovering) on a consistent basis, and yet we don't even see the pressing need to always be staring at the stupid chat screen.

My children will never get a smart phone of that nature while they are in school. I'll get the dumbest phone I can still get my hands on and give them that, and only because payphones have gone the way of the do-do bird while the need to maintain contact between parents and children still exist. I am glad that my consort-candidate is in agreement with this as well.

And that's the first rant point. I feel a little better getting it out of my system, even though I know that this post is going to do absolutely nothing in reversing the rise in technodiocy.

The second rant point is triggered from an incident that occurred no more than an hour ago. I was on a bus heading home, and had secured my usual backward-facing seat. It's my usual because for some reason, no one will willingly choose to sit facing in the opposite direction of travel of the bus, which of course means that I have better than even odds of actually having a place ``reserved'' for the likes of me. Out of so many trips, it is on no more than five occasions that I failed to secure my usual place, but that's a mere diversion of this other point.

The bus stopped at one of the many stops, and a mother (I think) and child came onboard. Said child was probably no more than seven, all puny and what-not, and the mother was carrying a bulky but light looking plastic bag of widgets. They made their way to the back of the bus where there was only one seat left, the centre one that opened directly into the walking aisle with hardly any thing else.

Now, if you've not taken any of SIN's public buses, allow me to make yet another diversion. The centre rear-most seat is a bloody dangerous seat---it's slippery, has no other seats in front of it for bracing against sudden stops, which is a problem because more often than not the bus driver is a maniac that likes to accelerate and decelerate really quickly due to having an automatic transmission. For safety reasons, the centre seat of the buses now have a seat belt to help mitigate some of the risks. Most able-bodied people don't use it because it is often too damn annoying to find and buckle up in.

Now this mother and child pair made their way to the seat, and the mother sat in it and led the child to stand between her legs. I got pissed---it was clearly an at-risk behaviour for the child. I saw that the mother was hugging her child, but let's be realistic here; if something were to happen, the chances of the hugging being strong enough to hold the child such that the latter doesn't fly off to injure itself is just miniscule.

So, I stood up and looked at the mother, offering my seat and telling her, ``please sit here''.

That woman merely looked back at me and said no.

I felt like running up to her, and shouting straight in her face at the stupid risks she was taking with her child. But I remembered an important lesson---one cannot teach another a lesson if the other refuses to learn. Inasmuch as I'd like the child to be safe, that child is of the responsibility of that woman, her mother. There was nothing else that I could have done that would be right while still satisfying society's notion of etiquette.

I didn't go back to my seat. I fumed and stared daggers at the mother before alighting the bus a few stops later, thinking to myself that I need to write this down to expunge it from my mind. That such idiotic adults exist is one thing that I cannot forget.