Recently, I wrote a blog about all the medical knowledge I’ve acquired since retirement in 2007 and, especially, over the last few years as I’ve progressed into the octogenarian decade. You can read about my newfound mastery of the medical world here.

Now I have another health problem – MTF (no, not Male-To-Female transsexualism) – but before I discuss it and reveal the three words behind the initialism, let me give you a little bit of background. I am a retired electronics engineer. Although I graduated with a degree in Aeronautical Engineering, my post-graduate career has been in the electronics industry. I lived and breathed electronics for just over forty years – practising, researching, teaching and consulting in my chosen field of the design of testable digital electronic systems. For a time, I even lived and worked in Silicon Valley, the world’s centre of electronic innovation in California. As a result, when I finally switched off in 2007, I was very familiar with electronic gizmos such as laptops, smartphones, various workhorse application programs such as Microsoft’s Office tools (Word, PowerPoint, Excel) and other more specialised ‘apps’ as they are now called. Family and friends came to me for advice on what to buy and how to use home computers and the associated WiFi/Internet support products. They listened to my predictions of how such tools might change in the future. They asked me to explain the differences between files and folders, web browsers and search engines, email and short message services. They sought my advice on whether to install a new operating system or not. And I gave my advice on these and other electronic-related topics freely and, I hope, in an unbiased way.

Not anymore!

As I’ve grown older, my grasp of modern technology products has weakened and I am now suffering from what can only be described as Modern Technology Fatigue, MTF. I am falling behind in my understanding of how simple things in the home can be made to work. I’ll give you three examples.

Underfloor heating controller

Just under a year ago, my wife and I downsized from a three-storey house to a bungalow – an exercise I will never repeat for the remainder of my life! Since moving into the bungalow last December, we have worked our way through a major refurbishment project that included installing underfloor heating in a spacious conservatory that borders the attractive back garden. Our intention is to use the conservatory throughout the whole year and underfloor heating will take the chill off during the winter months. When I discussed the details with the electrician who installed the system, we talked about the thermostat controller. ‘You can have a simple manually-operated controller or one that connects via your Wi-Fi to an app on your smartphone and which allows you to switch the heating on or off when it suits you,’ he said. ‘Oh, let’s go for the app-based thermostat,’ I said. ‘I like the idea of a remote control.’ Bad mistake!

Thermostat Programming Guide and Technical Manual

The underfloor heating works fine using the thermostat’s manual controls. As autumn approaches winter, the time has now come to install the app and make use of the remote control. My confidence that I could do this was high until I unfolded the Programming Guide and Technical Manual. The instructions are printed on a single sheet of A3-sized paper (circa 30cm x 42cm) and written in a small font (looks like Arial, 9) with 0.5cm margins: a Programming Guide on one side and a Technical Manual on the other. My heart sank. Working my way through all those instructions will tax my brain and may cause me sleepless nights and daytime tremors.

I’ve conceded defeat already and asked one of my sons to come and set it up for me. He has knowledge of these things.

New oven, microwave/oven combo, and induction hob

As part of the refurbishment project, we had a new kitchen installed – worktop, cupboards, sink and the whole enchilada of kitchen electrical white goods including a new oven, microwave/oven combo, and induction hob. Each cooking unit came with a printed A4-sized user manual of length 27 pages (induction hob), 51 pages (oven) and 58 pages (combo unit). In the good old days i.e., before we moved last year, we cooked on gas, which was easy to switch on and regulate, and microwaved in a simple unit which allowed us to set the microwave level from defrost to max, set a timer, and push Start. It’s not like that anymore. Now, there are so many options and programs all set by a variety of touch button controls that display a confusing set of unfamiliar symbolic images that require deciphering before attempting to cook anything. For example, the microwave/oven combo unit has ten types of heating menu: hot air, top/bottom heating, circo-roasting, pizza setting, grill (large area), grill (small area), bottom heating, slow cooking, dough proving, and plate warming. Similarly, cooking on the induction hob (a new venture for us) is controlled via touch buttons. There are eleven such buttons along the hob’s bottom edge: on/off switch, keep-warm function, PowerBoost/PanBoost, frying sensor, FlexZone, PowerMove, runtime, switch-off timer, timer/childproof lock, hood control, and hood light. My wife and I have no idea what some of these sensors do when selected. Their functions are described in the user manual but we would need to set aside an evening when we can carefully work through the manual with an array of pots, pans, and foodstuffs to experiment with and learn from. At the moment, we are concentrating on the basic stuff like boiling an egg, cooking a casserole, or using a steamer to cook vegetables. Maybe one day next year when it’s raining outside and we are feeling adventurous, we will gird our metaphorical loins, pour a large glass of tasty wine and keep the top-up bottle close by, agree not to argue when all goes wrong, and work our way through the hob’s user manual.

Incidentally, each of these three cooking units can be connected via the home Wi-Fi system to an app called Home Connect which will allow a certain level of remote control, enable the use of a voice assistant ‘for extra convenience’, and tell us when the meal is ready for consumption. That’s another one-day-next-year activity but I’m not pushing to do this. Apparently, the app does not yet wash, peel, and trim vegetables or load and unload the dishwasher! When it does, that’ll be a day to celebrate.

Mini Countryman car

In 2021, we exchanged our somewhat ancient 2007 BMW X3 SUV for a smaller younger 2018 Mini Countryman. The SUV was too big for our less-than-6,000-miles-per-year local journeys and the Countryman was a better fit for our mobility needs, and cheaper to run. What we did not appreciate was that between the years 2007 and 2018, the advance of electronics into car management has been rapid and all-embracing. The Countryman came with an A5-sized Owner’s Handbook containing 360 pages of instructions. Three hundred and sixty pages! To put that in perspective, there are 223 pages in the paperback edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and for those of you who have read, or maybe just possess a copy of my heavyweight tome on religion, even that book is only 297 pages long and contains 98,000 words. Clearly understanding the God business is not as important as understanding a Mini Countryman!

When we collected the Countryman, the sales guy pointed out the existence of the Owner’s Handbook. I leafed through it, checked that it contained an index (it did), and placed it in the glove compartment for use when we couldn’t figure out how to switch something on or off, needed to know how to respond to an unfamiliar dashboard alert, or change the time on the clock every six months (something we never learned how to do in the BMW X3). Having mastered the basics of the car – how to switch on the engine without using an ignition key, uncouple the handbrake without using a lever, and operate windscreen washers, lights and indicators, I felt that there would never be a reason to consult the handbook but if the need arose, the index would surely take me quickly to the relevant section. Not so.

About six months after we acquired the car, we were driving along a motorway, my wife driving as usual, when a car symbol flashed up on the dashboard screen. ‘What’s that?’ my wife said. ‘It’s a picture of a car,’ I replied, glibly. ‘I can see that,’ she said. ‘What does it mean?’ ‘Dunno,’ I answered. ‘Look it up,’ she commanded. ‘Okay, okay,’ I replied and fished the handbook from the deep recesses of the glove department wherein it had resided since I’d put it there six months earlier. Hmm, what should I look for in the index, I wondered? Dashboard symbols? Alerts? Displays? The first two search terms were not present in the index. The third term yielded a result. Under the red-light symbols (I discovered that such symbols were colour-coded red, amber and green) was the explanation: advance warning, for example if a danger of collision is anticipated or there is a very short distance to a vehicle in front. ‘Slow down. The symbol means you are too close to the car in front,’ I suggested gently but firmly. I won’t print her reply. This is a family-friendly blog.

Another, less important instance of when I had to refer to the book occurred a few weeks ago. The large circular control display in the centre of the dashboard of the Countryman has a coloured rim. When the salesman was walking us through the controls, he changed the colour of the rim from its default colour of red to an attractive blue and then set it back to red. Recently, while travelling in the car as a passenger, I thought I’d change the colour to blue but I’d forgotten how the salesman had done it. So once again I turned to the 360-page Owner’s Handbook. Do you think I could find the relevant section? Nope. I tried every index term I could think of: cosmetic colour changes, central display, changing colours, control display and control display settings (two different entries in the index). Some entries did not exist. In the ones that did, there was nothing about changing the rim colour. Eventually, a few days later, I found it under the Central instrument, LED ring index term on page 156, but by the time I’d done this, one of my granddaughters had worked out how to do it without reading the book and she had set the rim colour to blue. I felt suitably humbled.

So, what is the point of these examples? You could argue that we should have installed simpler ovens, microwaves and hobs in the new kitchen but my wife would argue otherwise. Or maybe I should have stuck with the simpler option of controlling the underfloor heating through a manual thermostat but I figured the ability to switch it on and off remotely or modify the programmed daily schedule through the app would be a benefit during the winter months. Or that changing the colour of the rim around the Countryman’s control display is not that important. It’s just a cosmetic feature and I like the red anyway. I agree with all these comments but the ex-electronics engineer in me wants to check out these new features even if I am predisposed to say that mostly they are unnecessary, a product of the feature-creep phenomena. Yep, all true, but I am more and more experiencing Modern Technology Fatigue when I do have a go at what should really be easy to do but no longer seems to be. Maybe it’s an age thing; diminishing competence as I grow older? Or that how-to instructions are written by young adults for young adults and with very little thought given to elderly users. Or simply that I have lost the desire to fight and thus command modern technology? Or all the above?

One thing I do know however is that when I face these types of battles with modern technology, (a) I’m not alone, and (b), either one of my children or grandchildren will sort it quickly, easily and intuitively. When I used to show family and friends how to do ‘stuff’ on a laptop, I would sometimes get the quizzical enquiry, ‘How do you know how to do that?’ to which I would always reply, ‘It’s intuitively obvious.’ The teacher-student roles have reversed. I now ask the how question and receive the intuitively-obvious response.

A Bert and Mavis cartoon.
For more Bert and Mavis cartoons, see Bert and Mavis: The First Fifty Cartoons

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