Take me back to days of no passwords - modernity has complicated our lives - give me a beer

A lie has been peddled - and we've bought into it unquestioningly - that technology will not only improve our lives, but will also simplify them.

I remember a time when a cellphone - which I resisted for a long time - used to be simply that: a tool you could use to make and receive calls.

Now it's become a camera, for both still photos and videos.

It's also a thing through which you send and receive e-mails. You also surf the internet here. And through it, the cops can trace you.

For those of you who are naughty, your spouse can also use your cellphone to track you.

I remember a time when I knew all the roads in my home town of Durban and could direct people how to get to such-and-such a place.

Then they installed navigators into our cars. When a person gives me directions to a place, I don't really listen: all I do is punch the information into the gadget, and let the white woman with the monotonous voice take over.

I start driving and she guides me to my destination. If she gets it wrong - the existing roads do not always match what she thinks she knows - then I am doomed. Or if the gadget itself breaks down then I am in the dwang.

I've also noticed that in addition to getting lost in town because I rely too much on the darn navigator, I also cannot retain people's addresses and telephone numbers like I used to. They are all stored in some abominable machine somewhere - but not in my memory bank anymore.

I remember a time when at the office we had a printer, a fax, a photocopier, a scanner. Then some smarty pants, in the name of making our lives easier, decided to collapse all these gadgets into one machine. Those of us who work from home don't have much choice but to buy these combos. Then the bloody thing breaks down.

Now you have to keep driving to PostNet or some such place for a simple photocopy or a fax. In a normal office, when a photocopier dies, you could always improvise: revert to the fax machine to make a copy of something.

I remember a time when bread was bread. Brown or white. Then they introduced low GI bread, wheat bread, organic bread, so much so that when I go to the supermarket I spend some time looking for something that looks vaguely familiar. Except there isn't. They keep changing these breads, too. New and improved. Less sugar. Low in cholesterol. Low fat. High in fibre. No wheat. May I please have some bread?

As a child I used to love Jelly Tots. Enjoyed them even as an adult. That was before they came in caramel flavour, in chocolate flavour, wrapped in coconut crumbs. Where are my Jelly Tots?

And then potato chips. Potato chips used to be quite simple: crisp fried potato with salt. Now they have chutney flavoured, caramel coated chips, pumpkin chips, carrot chips, butternut chips. I have tried to find simple, unadulterated potato chips with salt. Not even salt and vinegar, just plain salt. Please!

When I started drinking I was initiated through beer. In those simpler, innocent days beer came in three categories: ale ( Lion Ale), lager (Castle and other lagers) and stout (Castle Milk Stout). Simple. No manga-manga business.

Now they have pumpkin-flavoured beer. I kid you not! They have beer with a hint of mint. They have apple-flavoured beer. They have beer that matches your shirt if you, like me, are partial to pink shirts. Give me a beer. Please!

I remember an age when a password was something that was the province of CIA and KGB spies. In the movies. These days, a Common Joe like myself is obliged to have a sizeable collection of passwords. One for the credit card, one for the Facebook account. One for Twitter. One for Gmail. One for entering your place of employment. One for your Loot.co.za or Amazon.com and other online stores.

The painful thing is that Big Brother somewhere can tell if you have used a certain password at some other institution. So Big Brother rejects that password when you try to register it at another institution.

Big Brother complicates things even further by telling you that in creating your new password: you cannot use consecutive numbers on the numerical scale; you have to mix UPPER and lower case; you have to sprinkle your password with such symbols as !#?& to have a "strong", and therefore acceptable, password.

Everything has become so complicated that even breaking up is not easy any more. In the past, you would simply write a short missive: "Our golden cup is broken, bye." And run like hell.

These days you have to unfriend on Facebook, block on Twitter, remove the number from cellphone contacts list, even change your cellphone number.

If this be progress, I want to go back.

lComments: fredkhumalo@post. harvard.edu