9742/21661
Technology is meant to make our lives easier- and look, it really fucking does and there's only about an 80% chance that it will eventually rise up and destroy us. But it's still pretty annoying when it doesn't work properly.
I was going for a run this morning and couldn't find my headphones. I looked everywhere I could think of and then tried to activate the beep. But my Find My app seemed sure that my headphones were at the tennis courts.
I had been there yesterday and couldn't remember using the headphones since then, but would I really have left them on the bench where I'd put them when I arrived and not noticed them when I left? They're the big over the ears ones.
But the Find My app seemed to place them in the pavilion (which I didn't even go into) so I thought maybe some kind tennis player had found them and stored them there until the owner came forward.
So as I was going for a run anyway, I ran down there first and had a look around. Even though my phone was sure that the headphones were there, they clearly weren't. It was possible that they'd run out of batteries and so this was the last time they were able to communicate with the phone. Surely a Hitchin tennis player wouldn't go so low as to steal headphones...
I ran on through the outskirts of the town, feeling pretty fit I have to say. Though it's good to get through some audiobooks while I exercise, it's also pretty cool to be left alone with your thoughts.
One of my thoughts was - oh I wonder if the headphones are in the bag I took to tennis yesterday. Which might have been the first place you looked. But I was somewhat swayed by my phone insisting the headphones were in the tennis pavilion.
I got home and yes, the headphones were in the bag. I have since charged them and my phone still thinks they are in the tennis pavilion. Maybe the first wave of the attack on humans by AI will just be to mildly inconvenience them, making their reliance on tech lead them to making stupid decisions.
I don't know why I trust the find my phone thing. It often warns you that something has been left behind when it hasn't and the only time it's been really useful to me is when I lost the tracker from the dog's collar whilst out on a walk and was able to find it again. And that took two days.
My niece and her partner came for a flying visit to Hitchin today, having never been here before (they live in Paris so have no experience of a town as sophisticated as this). As it happened it was the turning on of the Christmas lights this evening and Ernie was performing songs with his drama group. The town square was packed to the point where there was a mild danger of crushing and it made the place look like a hub of fun and community spirit (which to be fair, it is. Don't come and live here and spoil it. Keep the secret. We don't want this place turning into Harpenden). We were able to pretend that it's like this every day.
Ernie's choir were great and then we bumped into some friends and had a drink at one of the cool little wine bars in the arcade before trying to squeeze our way to the opposite corner of the square to get to the restaurant we had booked. We couldn't really see the parade through the throngs, but we did catch the Christmas lights being turned on.
I am, of course, a hero in Hitchin due to making one of our benches into a toast rack on TV and I was stopped by more than none people telling me how great I was. It wasn't quite as many as two, but it was more than none. And the more than none was very enthusiastic. Hello Donna.
