Rosher.Net

Day five million and three of the Coronavirus lockdown.

You would think it impossible, really, to lose your iPhone when you’ve barely left your room, much less your house. Instead, it turns out to be rather easy.

Janet has a habit of losing her iPhone, and asking me to ring it. Then it’s a race around the place before it goes to voicemail. Today, she can ring me.

Ah, technology… Every blasted iThing everywhere starts ringing! The iMac in the study rings. The iPad in the bedroom rings. And here’s the delightful nightmare… even my bloody hearing aids ring!!!

Yes, I’ve been assimilated by the Borg. I am bionic. And such a relief to be able to hear the higher frequencies; the insects, the string section, conversations with sibilants in them… But it doesn’t help you find your phone.

Eventually, my having triple checked every room in the house and stared cautiously at the mid-cycle washing machine, Charlie says ‘check your dressing gown’ and of course that’s where it was.

Technology has however been deliciously useful, as friends pop in and out of the Whereby. Sometimes I only notice when they gently cough or yell ‘bish!’

I have thus far remembered to mute the microphone while I’m being inattentive of the screen, and have failed to walk in to my study naked.

Of course, there’s always a first time…

“Can you hear me, mother?”

Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935), Soviet rocket pioneer, using an ear trumpet of his own design. Although he never built a rocket, Tsiolkovsky’s work was highly influential in the development of Soviet rocket and space technology. He became deaf after contracting scarlet fever at around the age of 10 and from then on he schooled himself, mainly from books in his father’s library. He determined that the Earth’s escape velocity was 8 kilometres per second and showed that this could be achieved using liquid-fuel rockets. Photographed in 1934, in Kaluga, Russia.

Image from Google images