KILLING TIME

Passing gallstones hurts, but passing time hurts more. Especially if you’re eleven and waiting to play Star Wars Battlefront on your brand new Xbox One.

First the box needs updating. Cue two hour wait with mid-strength teary tantrum. But we get there ahead of time, and suddenly there’s hope. The Microsoft account works. Good. The Xbox profile copies across. Good good. We get out the new game - on a good old disc God bless it. No more of this interminable downloading nonsense. 

But guess what, it turns out the game isn’t finished. The bloke who was supposed to have finished it must have nipped out for a vape and left it on his workbench where the bloke who was supposed to put it in a case and take it to Amazon mistakenly put it in a case and took it to Amazon.

(Unless of course they thought, sod it, the buggers are all online anyway so we’ll just send them the last bit when it’s done, so we can nip off early and get home to download the rest of that bloody game we bought which, it turned out, wasn’t finished).

Anyway, whatever the explanation, it needs an update. A quick calculation and the bleak truth reveals itself. It will be ready at half three. And it’s eleven in the morning. Cue full strength teary tantrum and general rants about he state of our bandwidth and why we have to live in this stupid backwater. 

And so we sit and watch the progress bar moving hardly discernibly and I think about that snail that’s two inches from the finishing line. In the first minute it covers one inch, but it’s getting tired, and the distance it covers in each subsequent minute halves. So although it never stops getting closer, it never EVER crosses the line. It just gets closer and closer, less and less quickly.

On reflection, some of the darkest moments in my life have been brought to me by BT. And now BT Broadband is treating me to a glimpse of life itself. By bringing me practically nothing, way too slowly. At the end of the day (assuming it does end - which isn’t looking likely) we’re no different to that snail. We're all heading towards the end, but we’re never going to see it. Because getting there happens to coincide with ceasing to exist. Which is a bummer. 

So there you have it, we’re all no more than infinitely decelerating snails sliming our way towards oblivion. Which makes the three o’clock in the afternoon thing really quite bearable, because at least there’s a good chance that we’ll all still exist when we get there.

But even that comforting assumption falls into doubt when my imposed internet ban causes a bitter and bloody war to break out, settled briefly by forcibly removing the eldest’s iPad Mini and placing it under armed guard. The eldest is getting bigger now, and sooner or later he’s going to deck me. Today we come close.

But the kids have a point. Because the bright young things at Gooplesoft don’t seem to be aware of the digital desert most of us still inhabit. And while fully-plugged urbanites wallow around day and night in a brimming bath of bandwidth, the rest of us are reduced to leaving the tap dripping into the kettle when we go to bed, in the vain hope that in the morning there’ll be enough for a cup of tea.

It's like the government of the 1950’s suddenly announcing that from now on food can only be distributed via television. There’d be trouble. Rioting in the streets no doubt. But the great unplugged of today have no voice. Because the people we’d like to spit bile at are only contactable via email. And it’s not easy to spit bile in an email. Even if you can get online to send it.

Back to the Xbox and we’re at 8%. The youngest has reverted to lego on the basis that it’s all there, and he’s not having to wait for each individual brick to extrude itself through the wall socket at a rate of one inch per hour. I’ve seen this before. The dreadful side effects of being offline are beginning to kick in. Soon he’ll be reduced to drawing approximate likenesses on a sheet of paper using nothing more than a pencil. A sickening sight for any parent. But there’s nothing I can do.

I check the router to see if the three green lights are lit. They are. I go into the garden and check the telephone line hasn’t been compromised by gnawing creatures. It hasn’t. And that it's still running up the pole and across the road. It is. And as far as I can see it’s still connected to something at the other side. Nothing to be done.

Inside the Xbox tightens its grip and the day’s pulse slows to practically nothing. The eldest tries to remember how to work the television, while the youngest looks quizzically at a pencil sharpener. I spit bile at the snails eating the climbing hydrangea, plucking them off and throwing them into the road.  Hard.

@jesoverthinksit