Where will our obsession with convenience end?

28 May 2017 - 02:00 By Ndumiso Ngcobo
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Ndumiso Ngcobo
Ndumiso Ngcobo
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So, the nine-year-old saunters into the kitchen where I'd sought refuge from the assault on my ears by the Fifa 17 battle in the TV lounge. (In my house I lost all my television privileges towards the end of the Mbeki presidency, you see.)

Anyway, he opens the fridge, grabs a punnet of white grapes, halts, whips around and asks, "Are these grapes seedless?" No, I respond, they're "regular" grapes. "Eeuw," he retorts, "whoever buys grapes in this house must remember to get seedless grapes from now on", before starting to head back to being Cristiano Ronaldo with a joystick.

So I stop him and ask what is so difficult about spitting out grape seeds and a "robust debate" to rival the McBride-General Phahlane insult-a-thon on channel 408 ensues.

My parting shot is: "Remember this moment when, in 30 years, your own son refuses to eat an apple because it's an old-fashioned one with a core."

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It's inevitable, isn't it? There's a 23-year-old Korean geek with seven PhDs working on eliminating seeds from apples in some lab somewhere as I type this. And it will happen long before we find a cure for diabetes or irritable bowel syndrome.

I'm not averse to scientific progress. In fact, I embrace scientific innovation. For instance, the first time I paused and rewound live TV I thought, "Why didn't I think of this?".

Of course, the good ole PVR has ruined other experiences. Am I the only one who finds himself trying to rewind live radio when I miss something and then yelling out, "Damn you DStv!"?

But where does our obsession with convenience end?

The television remote recently went missing in the boys' TV lounge. The DStv remote was there and perfectly functional. This means that the only issue was manually switching the TV set on and switching it off. But Houston, did we have a problem!

We came just short of being made to take polygraph tests to testify that we hadn't hidden the bloody thing. The missus and I sat the boys down and tried to explain to them that being without a remote was not the end of the world.

They were with us until I told them that for the first 10 years of my own television viewing, we didn't even have a remote. They decided I was a worse liar than the Eskom board.

I wanted to tell them about the bunny ears aerial and how I once stood next to the TV set holding it up during a Mainstay Cup final between Pirates and Swallows so that my dad's friends could get a clear picture, but decided against it to salvage the little credibility I had left.

I could say the same about cars. At a recent birthday party a friend of mine, Nkanyezi, went on an unprovoked rant about folks who drive cars with manual transmission. "Why do people do this?" he screeched, simulating the motion of changing gears.

Look, I get it. Changing gears on William Nicol Drive at around 5pm on a month-end Friday would make Pope Francis swear like an Irish sailor with a dozen Guinnesses inside him. I don't know who William Nicol was, but if he was Catholic, the pope could declare him the patron saint of constipation.

While on automobiles, do we really need windshield wipers that go on automatically when it starts raining? Is there anyone reading this who has been caught in a hurricane and wondered why visibility was so poor before realising, "Oh, I forgot to switch on the wipers!"?

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Maybe the original humans could control their own breathing until nature figured out that too many of us were dying from forgetting to inhale. And just in case someone is hallucinating that I'm impervious to this retardation I'm talking about, banish the thought. I recently had to drive someone else's car. After I dropped it off I complained bitterly about having to roll my own window up and down.

But my biggest gripe about the "progress" we're making has to be the food-on-tap trajectory.

Maybe we should rethink instant food. Buying ready-made spaghetti bolognaise and popping it into the microwave for three minutes is not where we should be going. Maybe we would eat less if we had to boil the spaghetti and cook the mince.

I have a friend with Type 2 diabetes. His doctor has told him that he can reverse the condition if he gets rid of the 20kg continental pillow between his crotch and chest. But I think he's too distracted by triple-decker pizzas to care.

I recently watched a show with a 270kg man who has become so immobile the only muscles he can move are the arms he uses to shove burgers down his pie hole. He can't even go through his bedroom door.

But I bet there's a geek with an IQ of 250 working on a "solution". And I bet it involves houses with adjustable walls that expand as the occupants expand.

Follow the author of this article, Ndumiso Ngcobo, on Twitter: @NdumisoNgcobo

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