No-one likes to be spied upon but could you move that motion detector a bit closer?
Swipe any direction when you’re in black heaven
This week you find me crawling blindly along a tiled floor with my trousers around my ankles. I had hurriedly pulled my trousers up a moment ago but, with my belt undone and my flies still open, the action of crawling has relentlessly tugged them back down.
Fridays, eh?
I am in the toilet facilities at a client’s premises. It is pitch black. Like, absolutely not a single chink of light at all. Silent, too. It’s like the world ended and I’m in black heaven – or worse.
It wasn’t like this a few minutes ago when I first pushed open the cloakroom door with private post-lunch ablutions in mind. Motion sensors detected my presence and instantly illuminated the long room. Hmm, tastefully lit, I thought, as I pushed into a randomly chosen cubicle. I even admired the design of the floor tiles as I unbuckled my belt – not realising I would end up with my face mere inches from the same faux marbling very shortly.
There I was, sitting on the loo and reading a newspaper I’d picked up from reception when all of a sudden everything was plunged into impenetrable darkness.
It turns out that they don’t put motion sensors inside the cubicles.
To make the precarious position I was in seem even worse, the allegorical cold hand of unwelcome nostalgia dropped metaphorically onto my, er, [checks thesaurus] analogous shoulders. This was, it occurred to me with a shiver, like being caught in the bog during a power cut at home when I was a nipper in the 1970s. I was only shivering because my parents’ house was fucking freezing all the time, mind, but we certainly experienced power cuts a lot throughout this period.
And you thought “reading a newspaper” made me sound old! The 1970s! Can you dig it? Right on!
Age has played a major part in my predicament, I believe. I’m only crawling around my client’s Sensory Deprivation Privy because I was hired to conduct some training courses. And they probably only booked me because I was born on the wrong side of the century, which makes me older than all of the day’s trainees – put together, by the look of them this morning.
How did this come about? Well, although freelancers like me are unable to earn seniority through their professional careers in the way that conventional employees can – i.e. simply by continuing to breathe and dodging redundancy – the passing of time can accumulate for contractors a little bit of credibility. And when you reach a certain age and assuming you are not entirely hopeless at your job, someone somewhere will suggest that you turn your head towards training younger people.
Yes, I appreciate that everyone gets told to bring a new colleague up to speed occasionally, or asked to explain to the CEO for the 20th time how to press Ctrl+P in order to make the toner fairies in the smelly whirring box produce coloured marks on sheets of A4. What I’m talking about is being hired to deliver media tech skills training for people you don’t work with, have never met before and may never cross paths with ever again.
Like policemen, trainees – or ’participants’ as we’re supposed to call them according to my copy of Training For Dummies – seem to get younger with every new batch. When I started doing serious training, with official qualifications and everything, I would read a trainee’s birth date in her enrolment form – and I do mean “her” as all trainees are women in their early twenties, by the way, don’t ask me why – and then find myself trying to remember what I was doing that year. Was I still at school, or uni or in my first job?
Not too long ago, I would read a trainee’s birth date on the booking form and wonder what I was doing that particular month. Now it has come to a stage where I can glance at their birth date and recall conversations I had on that day.
Now, here’s the thing: one of the challenges for a trainer moving into old-dufferhood is to keep their real-world examples and anecdotes up to date. It was particularly awkward this week as the topics of electricity generation and energy pricing are very much a matter of public debate at the moment for young people, and I made the mistake in class of referring to power cuts when I was a kid in the 1970s.
Talking about daily power cuts to those born a quarter of a century after they took place and therefore has probably never experienced one is a bit like, oh I dunno, like asking them to imagine what it might be like to risk being discovered half-naked on the floor of the toilets at work. Sure, they can try to empathise with the embarrassment but it’s not the same as actually living through the nightmare. No it isn’t, I can assure you.
Unless they are victims of a hurricane or flooding, most people experience a loss of mains electricity as a rare and only slightly inconvenient half-hour outage once every year or so, during which their smartphones and laptops keep going until the current returns.
Precisely a decade ago, the then-CEO of the UK’s National Grid at the time, Chris Train, pointed out that we’re consuming electricity in increasingly gluttonous quantities when a bit of recession-friendly frugality might be in order. The public reaction was inevitable: “Bah, what’s the man talking about, energy is inexhaustible, isn’t it?”
Well, energy is indeed. But the nicely packaged sparkly stuff coming out of our wall sockets surely isn’t, as people have finally been forced to acknowledge. Infrastructure has fallen out of sync with demand and we’re running decades late with the building of power stations.
I can only imagine how this will affect the bloke who lives just round the corner from where I used to in south-east London, whose increasingly elaborate external Christmas decorations must consume as much electricity as a small African nation. Along with the Great Wall of China and Emmanuel Macron’s ego, that festively lit home is one of just three things on Earth that can be seen with the naked eye from space. I distinctly remember seeing his house pass behind Sandra Bullock at least seven times.
Back in the day, there would be a running joke – I suppose you’d call it a ‘meme’ – in which someone has to keep a lightbulb on by riding a stationary bicycle in their kitchen. My ex-neighbour must have been hosting an entire spin class in his basement.
But then I came across the TukasEV HR Bank, a “mobile sustainable energy storage device” which is another way of saying “indoor fitness bike with 2kWh rechargeable battery”. Apart from the brutalist cubic design, it is literally the aforementioned meme brought to life. Scroll through their home page and you will find an illustration of someone sitting on one of these bikes at the office, powering up their laptop as they pretend to do some work.
Given that the price of one of these bikes would pay for two years of electricity bills in my little house, I’d have to really want to convert those fat cells into power cells to make it worthwhile. Still, you have to admire their chutzpah.
Certainly we’ve come a long way from the wind-up radio. A while back there was a crowdfunded project to build a gravity-powered lamp: you hung a heavy sack of whatever you like on its hook and the weight pulled downwards slowly like on a grandfather clock, generating enough power to illuminate the LEDs. Since then, Deciwatt has also come up with variants, my favourite being the hand-pulled NowLight. Just pull the strap downwards and you generate electricity.
Who’d have thought that one minute of tugging would power two hours of light? The world could satisfy its electricity demand simply by harnessing teenagers.
There’s even supposed to be a brand of floor tiles that converts the kinetic energy of people walking over them into electricity. [I’d share a link but it seems to be broken at the moment.] Anyway, the process is apparently known as “footfall harvesting” and – unless you are a professional tap-dancer who rehearses at home, or maybe just an almighty fat bastard constantly walking back and forth between the kitchen and the TV – will probably only make sense installed in workplaces.
At this very moment, I would have appreciated some of these so-called “power tiles”, especially if they used the power you generate by walking over them to light up as you do so. Or in my case, as I crawl… on the floor… in the round.
Well, the client where I am working is using neither power tiles nor exercise bikes. Its determination to reduce its energy consumption extends only to an automatic timer for the lights in the shitter, and I fear there may be only a single motion detector – probably near the door.
I arrive at this conclusion while still sitting in the cubicle and waving my hands around in vain amid the obsidian obscurity that I have been plunged into. I even feebly call out “Hey, whoah!” as if the lighting might be voice-activated. It isn’t.
Once the, ah, unmentionable tasks are out of the way – i.e. trying to evaluate the operation of the proprietary paper dispenser by touch alone, as well as the status of one’s own hygiene by counting swipes – I scrabble for the cubicle door lock. It seemed simple enough when I closed it but unlocking it in the dark is like a challenge within an unusually malodorous escape game.
I now crawl gingerly along, trying to remember the layout of the room and hoping not to bump my head on a sink. Every now and again I raise an arm to wave it around a bit. If only I can make it to the door, I tell myself, the motion sensor might pick me up and switch the lights back on. Nearly there… nearly there…
At this exact moment, someone enters the washroom and the lights came back on. It is a woman in her early 20s. Damn that gender-confused sign on the door! Even in the energy-efficient gloom, it is clear that there is a strange man, naked from the waist down, on all fours, in the middle of the ladies' toilet.
I humbly suggest to the young woman that her employer’s solution to the looming energy shortage is unsatisfactory.
I also humbly admit that it is also not the best way to be introduced to your afternoon’s training delegate.
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. He apologises to new subscribers. Seasoned readers will know that ‘Autosave is for wimps’ is obligated to return to the theme of toilets every other week. Feel free to complain in the comments. Then wash your hands.
You must have better electical supply where you are than where I am in France! I still have wind-up torches and candles for the regular blackouts in stormy weather, that don't last very long, for sure, but when considering cooking and heating options for this house/office, I made sure to have a woodburning heating option (no town gas here) and a bottle gas cooking option. But that may also be because I remember blackouts in the 70s too :)
"Who’d have thought that one minute of tugging would power two hours of light? The world could satisfy its electricity demand simply by harnessing teenagers."
Brilliant!