wireless warning (from Sunday Times July 2008)

This week I saw a man wearing a T-Shirt that detected wireless hotspots and lit  up whenever it entered one. Fortunately I was wearing a harness with a flamethrower attached to it that is designed to detect twats and it lights up whenever it encounters anyone with more computer interface leads than friends, so he won’t be bothering us anymore.

            But it got me thinking. With all this modern technology that pours out of our internet cords, updating our lives with a never ending stream of binary sludge isn’t it time we stopped and wondered what’s happening to the air around us? For instance, what if it’s not coal or our Clarkson footprint that’s making bits of sky burst apart like the doom-mongers say? What if it’s the great big cloud of wireless that’s hanging round all over the place like a networked fart ? Think about it. It’s still new technology. We don’t know what it does yet. It might do nothing except sit there, but there’s always an outside chance it could gain sentient intelligence and start eating us like The Blob, but a Blob made out of wireless instead of a Blob of whatever The Blob was made out of.

            It’s like when the microwave oven became de rigour. My parents got one sometime around 1983 and have only recently stopped eyeing it with suspicion on the grounds that me and my two sisters didn’t grow up with three mutant heads each and a single, shared, glowing spleen. It turned out not be all that dangerous.  Well not if you used it properly. Ours was dangerous but that’s because when they went out I used to experiment with it; exploding eggs, light bulbs in cups of water that would glow with the ferocity of a pregnant sun - and to this day my sister still doesn’t know the real reason her Barbie went all melty. I told her it was because while she’d been at school, Barbie had opened the Ark of the Covenant.

            More recently of course it was mobile phone masts that were going to smash our brains off. Then it was something else, I dunno, podcasts made of asbestos or something and parents worried that their child’s playground was too near to the site of a download or an mp3.              Should we worry? Wireless used to mean the thing in the corner made of valves that had the Home Service coming crackling out of it but now we have to call that a radio and a wireless is something that lives in your house sending music and films invisibly through the furniture.              I’ve just bought a new laptop and when I switched it on it instantly knew all about my wireless. It speaks to everything else in the house in friendlier terms than I speak to my neighbours. It never ceases to amaze me just how it all works, this marvellous futuristic technology. But the downside is that it’s made the air in my office smell funny. Kind of like electricity that’s on fire. And there isn’t a fire because I’ve looked. Plus the cat won’t go in there anymore. But the fact that I can move files from desktop to desktop through space and also look at the internet in the garden kind of outweighs all this.

            I’ve got a safety plan though. My friend Andy has even fewer wires than I do so I’m going to wait and see what happens to him. Films, music, internet - all of it streams wirelessly through his house. He’s actually quite disappointed that no-one has yet found a way to stream food from the fridge directly to his stomach because then he wouldn’t have to leave his chair at all. He lives in hope. And if and when his face melts, I’ll be in my house, pulling some plugs out.

            So is it safe or shall we one day wake up, peer hopelessly at our routers through milky, metallic eyes and rue the day we all went wireless? When the robots come, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The Da Vinci Codeshare (Jon's piece in the Sunday Times 18th September 2011)

What’s the worst thing about flying? Apart from crashing, obviously. Allow me to make a pitch for the noble art of codesharing, where you buy a seat on one airline only to find that it’s actually a seat on a different airline because the two airlines have joined up in an ‘alliance’ which is something that they have specially created to make your journey worse.

Codeshare alliances, sayeth the airlines “are in the customer’s best interests, allowing greater access to cities and making connections simpler” but this is a lie. What they are, in fact, is a ruse dreamt up by noted airline advisory company Satan’s Consultancy Services , to save them time and money. (And anyone who says Satan doesn’t consult for airlines has clearly never been through Heathrow security.)

Recently I was booked onto a flight with British Airways, fully expecting, as I was booked on a flight with British Airways, that I would be travelling on a flight with British Airways. Silly me. How naive. No, despite having booked a flight with British Airways I was in fact travelling on a flight with American Airlines. Why? Because they were codesharing.

So what, you might say, a plane is a plane. Shut up, get on it, have a drink, watch a film and relax. Well I would but sadly, unlike BA (which I had booked) American (which I had not) were charging for drinks and had very little in the way of film, given there were no seatback screens anywhere to be seen, just a distant overhead monitor showing Jane Eyre with the brightness turned down.

How many international flights have you been on with no backseat screens recently? And who wants to drink Heineken, let alone pay four pounds per can for it? Thing is, if I’d wanted to fly American Airlines, I’d have booked American Airlines. That’s how life works. I don’t go into a shop wanting to buy trousers only to be told that today trousers are codesharing with skirts and thus I must leave the shop dressed as a transvestite. Why should we accept this nonsense? All I want is what I’ve paid for. You don’t book a meal at Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant, pop on your glad rags and lick your lips at the prospect of a Nitrogen Baked Snail Infused With A Smear Of Barium Gas only to find when you get there that on this particular evening The Fat Duck is codesharing with Nandos. You’d be angry and disappointed and rightly so.

“But I was looking forward to Heston’s signature Macerated Otter Liquefied with a Gash of Sulphuric Aspic.”

“I’m sorry we’ve only got chicken.”

“But I don’t want chicken.”

“Sorry, did I say chicken? I meant pork. Tonight the chicken is codesharing with pork. It’s in the customer’s best interests.”

No it isn’t. Why don’t we get what we pay for? Or, if we don’t, at the very least get some sort of partial refund? You pay for BA service yet receive an inferior AA service in its place. I mean, I don’t pay BT for 60 megabytes of “lightning fast” broadband and only get less than half a meg slowly meandering down my internet pipes do I? Alright, bad example, that’s exactly what I get, but that angry Sunday Times article can wait for another day. Hang on, the waiter’s back.

“Has Sir chosen a wine? "

“Yes I’ll have the 1998 Chateau La Mission please.”

“I’m so sorry Sir, but tonight the Chateau La Mission is codesharing with Tizer.”

“I don’t want Tizer. I don’t like Tizer.”

“It’s nicer than Heineken.”

“True, but I still don’t want it.”

“I’m afraid Tizer is all that’s available Sir."

“Well, I suppose at least it’ll be cheaper than the red.”

“Dear me no Sir. It may be not what you wanted or ordered but with codesharing you see, you still have to pay the original price of the thing you bought but cannot have. In this case that’s £550 for a can of Tizer.”

I wonder if anyone’s ever investigated the conspiracy theory that the real reason the 9/11 hijackers flew AA Flight 77 into the Pentagon is that they booked to fly with someone else, quite happily and without incident to Los Angeles but, when they found it was a codeshare with no seatback entertainment, drinks were four quid and Jane Eyre was on they just simply decided to end it all there and then.

As we got off the plane (a day late due to an American Airlines (who I had not booked with) cancelling my original flight) the pilot’s voice scratched and clicked over the PA.

“Thank you for flying with us ” he said. “We know you have a choice.”

Yes, except we don’t.