When did iPhones become compulsory?

On the train today I overheard an unsettling conversation...A professional looking woman of the Baby Boomer generation was enlightening her similar demographic friends about the wonders of the iphone. She spoke of how just now on the train she had checked facebook and left a message on her daughters page as if this action is such a common necessity of everyday life that the ability of the iphone to accomplish this makes it more than a mere accessory, rather an essential tool of 21st century life.

I'm aware that most people find iphones and their ilk extremely useful but I'm not sold and I only assumed that neither were my more stubborn elders. Don't get me wrong I have a mobile phone, portable music player, external hard-drive etc. and the idea to combine the three is very efficient, there's no doubting the cleverness of today's technology. What I take issue with is the need to have these devices with us at every waking moment. Here's a cartoon that expresses my distaste for all the 'gadgets' that come with it....

So lame!
I mean honestly if I'm going somewhere I check the map beforehand, if I get lost I can ring someone or ask for directions, not terribly inconvenient. I don't need to play 'air' hockey, pinball, darts or bomber challenge on the train, I'm quite happy reading my book thank you. I could go on but I don't want to disparage those that do enjoy everything these interactive phones have to offer. In closing I am not easily bought by cheap tricks. 

My parents like good Baby Boomers aren't very good with technology and my dad has recently taken to saying that he's read scientific reports hinting that mobile phones will be the cigarettes of our century. Maybe he's watched The X-Files too often and he sees conspiracy where there is none, but I don't really believe that. All those microwaves going through your brain have to have some kind of negative effect, the levels produced by mobile phones aren't natural in the least. Is there a giant cover-up going on? But as the cartoon below quite adeptly points out, who's going to stop using them? My old housemate couldn't survive 5 min without his, we used to have great fun hiding it until we saw how distressed he got after just 20 min. And I admit, not without some guilt mind, I wouldn't throw mine away in a hurry, although meaningless as it sounds I put people on speaker phone as often as possible thinking this makes a difference.

And final food for thought here is a picture from Swiss research which apparently shows how the radiation produced by mobiles affects the brain.

Call it 3:30-itis

"The best way to enjoy your job is to imagine yourself without one"

-Oscar Wilde

I think in this instance I'd have to disagree with Wilde, I think if people took his advice they wouldn't go to work on Mondays, they'd go surfing every day and apply for the Dole. I love the outdoors nature of my job, sure you're dirty and exhausted by the end of the day but it always feels like a worthwhile expenditure of effort. However when we're not in the field I sit in an office from 8am to 5pm, Monday to Friday. It's terribly pathetic of me, considering I've only had this 'office-based' job for 6 months but I already can't stand the monotomy of dragging my butt all the way to Perth every morning. Imagining myself not having to do this would be like imagining chocolate makes a woman thin. It doesn't, this kind of thought process would only result in me getting fat from being un-employed and eating chocolate all day.

The word 'office' stems from the Latin word Officium which had various meanings in Ancient Rome, including "service", "(sense of) duty", "courtesy" and "ceremony". If these defintitions are supposed to apply to todays office environment I feel they're sadly lacking. My sense of duty extends to having my lunch in front of the computer screen every second day, I like to think I'm convincing my collegues that I'm efficiently working and eating but really I'm just browsing anything that takes my fancy. During lunch 'break' today I compiled a list I feel like sharing.

Things I Loathe about the Office;

1. The temperature is always sub-zero so you have to literally wear a jumper and scarf in the office then sweat through every layer of clothing as you leave the building to buy some lunch.
2. Being West Perth where secretaries look like models I can't wear comfortable, sensible converse sneakers instead I must wear womens 'court' shoes, surely designed by Chinese men they create blisters on blisters and have a habit of slipping off at the most inconvenient moments eg. as I'm jay-walking across traffic or walking in front of the bosses office.
3. There are only 6 people in our office so the near un-bearable silence sets my nerves on edge all day.
4. There are no open windows, air is circulated via a large air conditioning system which leaves your skin dry and oily simultaneously and makes me paranoid about Sick Building Syndrome (SBS) or the T-virus being released in our building.
5. My office tasks are so boring, repetitive, mundane, mind-numbing and of such little import I feel like asking my boss if they wouldn't prefer a monkey.
6. Despite the apparent silence or maybe because of it office politics is like an ongoing season of Survivor.
7. My neck and back ache from constantly vegetating in the office chair, sometimes I wonder how long I'd need to sit there before my buttock molded with the furniture?
8. The cookie jar! How it jeers at me every time I make a cup of tea and through a mighty strength of will resist sampling it's sweet contents.
9. And finally the futility of looking forward to 5pm because let's face it, tomorrow morning I have to get up and repeat the same process.

"Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things."

-Robert Louis Stevenson

Now this sounds more like it. Sitting in an office all day feels like a fermentation process. I think of all the things I could be doing and learning, why shouldn't I read more classics and finish some art and craft. These skills are being neglected. My health is being neglected. In March this year the Sydney Morning Herald released an article that said;

"Evidence that sitting for prolonged periods of time is bad for your health is mounting. It has now been linked to premature death, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity and some cancers."

Whilst an article in the UK Telegraph a couple of years ago stated;

"Workers (in the UK) spend almost 60,000 hours sitting at their office desk during their career, drink 32,000 cups of tea or coffee and make 110,000 phone calls"

Well apparently everything causes cancer these days but the others are worrying. Maybe I am just a complaining worry wart and should learn to build a bridge, at least I have a job! Now I've all those moral-crushing feelings out in the blog-o-sphere I'll endevour to stop brooding on them. Thank you blogger!

Fine and dandy...

And just what is a dandy I hear you ask? Not to be confused with rakehells and bounders of popular romantic fiction the term 'dandy' originated as a vogue word during the Napoleonic Wars and persisted through to the 20th century. A dandy was always immaculately dressed but their 'image' was more than just clothes, their wit and fine language was refined, they cultivated fashionable hobbies and rejected bourgeois (loosely wealthy classes in capitalist society eg. owners & employers) values. A dandies clothes were always freshly laundered and tailor made to fit perfectly. When composing an outfit effort was made to show as much perfectly starched linen as possible, often in the form of an elaborately knotted cravat. The dandy himself was immaculately bathed and shaved, un-powdered and un-perfumed. Maybe that's why they had to change their snug outfits so often?

The most famous British dandy was the celebrity Beau Brummell (George Byran Brummell, 1778-1840). Part of the prince regents' set it has been written that he once took 5 hours to get dressed and would often change his outfit several times a day. A lot like my 19 year old boarder. In contrast to previous fashions of powdered wigs and loose breeches Brummell introduced snugly tailored dark 'pantaloons', essentially the modern trouser which has been the mainstay of men's wear for the last 2 centuries, and cut his hair short in the Roman fashion now associated with Romantic era poets. In fact Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron) occasionally dressed the part of a dandy and his friend Count d'Orsay (Alfred Guilluame Gabriel d'Orsay) was a great dandy in the 1940's. The french King of Naples, Joachim Murat, was dubbed the 'Dandy King' because of his immaculate image.

The 'Dandy King'

Charles Baudelaire wrote that an aspiring dandy must have "no profession other than elegance. . . no other status but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons. . . . The dandy must aspire to be sublime without interruption; he must live and sleep before a mirror". So now I've bored you with these common facts do they sound familiar? Certainly the fashion plates for the 2009 and 2010 winters show a reinvention of the dandy dress (minus the cravat unfortunately) but what of the social component of the dandy image? When I'm sitting on the train trying to read my book and ignore the people crammed together during the 5pm rush I can't help but listen to conversations and there seems to me to be an increasing trend in the appreciation of wit and good language in groups of young individuals. There's a sense that 'good' conversation is the height of enjoyment for the listener and achievement for the speaker. Perhaps this is related to the recent trendiness of reading or the need to express individuality or I've gone mad from over analysing everything. All I know is that my young male ex-boarder used more hair product and devices than me, often taking more than 30 min to 'arrange' it in a loosely tousled fashion which in my opinion looked no different from when he woke up that morning and was known to come home half way through a night out to change his outfit. Maybe it is just a dress fashion and a darned good one ;-)