Finding My Place by Anne Aly

Author:Anne Aly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-03-03T05:00:00+00:00

17

A Plus

When I finished school at the end of 1984, a common topic of conversation was how George Orwell’s vision of the future in his book 1984 had or had not come to fruition. Orwell’s dystopia, where people’s lives are lived in and ruled by fear, where history and reality are distorted to perpetuate that fear, and where every move and emotion are monitored and controlled, had been and gone by the end of the 1980s. Occasionally, I would come across an analytical piece that reflected on Orwell’s future vision and drew parallels to the world we now found ourselves in. A world where computers were increasingly playing a role in the ways we communicated, in our social lives and in the ways we marked time.

As the end of the 1990s approached, Big Brother was incarnated – but only as a reality television show where groups of horny twenty-somethings were thrown together in a house and made to do stupid things while viewers shovelling cheese-flavoured popcorn down their bored throats watched on from their living-room sofas – quite unaware that they were actually Big Brother.

In between the constant replays of the hit song by the artist once known as Prince, that made us all want to party like it was 1999, the greatest topic of conversation on the airwaves was the dreaded millennium bug that promised to wipe us all out of our technological existence and plunge us back into the dark ages before the internet and flip phones. There were stories of people who had stockpiled water and cans of food amid fears that time itself would stop because computers, which were infinitely smarter than tin-foil hatters named Billy Bob and Goober, would not cope with a series of zeroes. Even though I didn’t believe the doomsdayers and joined in poking fun at them, I must admit that I added a couple of extra cans of baked beans to the shopping list that week. You know, just in case the computers really did cause a wrinkle in the time–space continuum and dinosaurs roamed the earth again. That said, if I was going to be eaten by a dinosaur, I’m not sure that a can of baked beans would make any difference. Of course, the clocks ticked on and we all awoke on 1 January 2000 to a world that was pretty much the same as it had been twelve hours earlier.

I remember being around eight or nine and using my fingers to calculate how old I would be in the year 2000. Back then, thirty-three sounded so old and I don’t remember just how I must have imagined myself at thirty-three. I couldn’t tell you if my life was working out the way I had imagined it would. I might have thought that I would be getting around in a flying car to a home serviced by domestic robots that wore blonde wigs or bow ties depending on their gender assignment (because that’s the only way you could tell the boy robots from the girl robots).

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