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  Today Online 30 Dec 06
Mother Nature's no geek
If you want proof, just look at how she shook up those undersea cables — and our tech-dependent lives
Down Under with Neil Humphreys

MOTHER Nature has clearly had enough. Her proudest design has turned into a bit of an idiot.

She created Man and he's evolved into a geek. She gave us opposable thumbs so we'd have better fine motor skills than our fellow mammals. We use them for text messaging.

She afforded us the powers of speech and language. We write sentences like: "C U @ 8. B4 I 4GET, I LUV U. U R G8. LET'S MAKE BABY 2NITE." It's hardly Shakespeare. But in getting down with the hip and funky Internet generation, I hear it could be the new slogan for the next Romancing Singapore campaign.

One or two Singapore teachers told me that text-messaging speak had crept into English test papers. Now, how would that even work? "Oliva say pls sir cn I hv sm maw, I not 8 much & this stuff g8. Char Dick tink old Eng cls system v bad. Poor ppl cnt earn $4 makan. Oliva cnt tahan alredy. I tink also Oliva is girl name." Give it five more years and that'll constitute an A-grade paper.

But it doesn't stop there. Mother Nature gave us eyes to see and we spend our evenings staring at ourselves on blogs. Admiring our image on a webcam, we'll say to anyone who'll listen: "Isn't it great, yah? Look I can see myself. If I flick my hair to the left, you'll see me flick my hair in the webcam. Five seconds later, of course, there is always a slight delay. Let's flick our hair together. It'll be so cool!" There was a similar invention used by the Ancient Greeks. It was called a mirror.

Mother Nature filled the planet with seas and oceans and decorated them with coral reefs and exotic marine life. We put in undersea cables.

Marine tour companies have already revised their itineraries to include whale-watching, swimming with the dolphins and a snorkel around the Internet cable pipes in the South China Sea.

Clearly, things have all got a bit too "techy" for Mother Nature, a tad too geeky for her liking, so she shook things up a bit this week. The earthquake off the southern coast of Taiwan was no laughing matter. Two people were killed, Taiwanese homes collapsed, livelihoods were ruined and fires broke out in several towns.

But worst of all — most damagingly of all — Internet access in Asia was really, really slow! We haven't got a moment to lose here. Call the White House! Get Kofi Annan on the phone. Send in UN peacekeepers! If the peacekeepers are busy dealing with trivial matters such as military conflicts, send in those two YouTube guys. They must be able to do something because they're Internet geniuses.

Drastic situations demand drastic measures. If it takes us twice as long to download a guy sitting on the toilet on the YouTube website, then our lives are just totally not worth living anymore.

The international panic across Asia reminded me of that great scene in the disaster movie spoof Airplane where the captain announces that the plane is going to crash, every passenger is going to die, but worst of all … they've run out of coffee. Such daft hysteria has been in evidence this week.

They're picking their treasured belongings from rubble that was once their homes in Taiwan, but damn it, we can't download the latest podcasts down here! Rumour has it, though I can scarcely believe it myself, that some people in the region couldn't access their email accounts for an entire day. An entire day! That must have been a frantic 24 hours for the Samaritans.

This geeky dependence upon online technology has reached farcical proportions. Perspective has gone out the Microsoft window and even Mother Nature feels compelled to shake us up a bit.

Just a gentle nudge of a couple of undersea cables and our technology-dependent lives are thrown into chaos. To spread the word about the temporary Internet Armageddon, the opposable thumbs must have been working overtime this week … "Cnt c u play air guitar 2 Stairway 2 Heaven on net 2nite cos my com 2 slow. Its biggest crisis since lost tum drive @ Sim Lim."

The panicky, knee-jerk reactions have been almost comical and don't be surprised if you hear a faint giggling in the coming days. It's Mother Nature laughing at us.

Neil Humphreys' Final Notes From A Great Island was one of 2006's best-selling books.
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