Soulful machines.
Someone
recently put the question to me, which is the most ‘human’ machine I own. This
got me thinking; after all we use machines all day every day in our modern
life.
It took me a
long time to consider this, about five seconds actually, and the answer? I blame my mother.
You see, I
am a child of the pre-flower-power sixties, growing up in the fifties. My
father was an airplane mechanic during WW11 and then a car mechanic until he retired.
My mother was a homemaker, a terrific cook, seamstress and grandmother, but
mechanically challenged. While my father learned the intricacies of pistons,
sparks and fuel injectors, my mother perfected learned helplessness. When
anything mechanical went wrong in the house she called out….”Fred, the dratted
washing machine won’t work again!” So dad ambled in with his spanner, screw
driver and mandatory dirty rag and twiddled and fixed it every time.
This heritage
of learned helplessness was passed on to me. Unwittingly I accepted the fact
that women called for men to fix things, and men fixed things. It was one of
the basic laws of nature. This problem was compounded when I married a man,
who, like my father, was in my eyes, a mechanical genius. It was the normal
thing for me to yell out…”Peter, the oven won’t go!” and he would toddle in,
fiddle with something and the oven would then happily purr along doing its job.
Now, when
you are talking about the old fashioned washing machine with wringers, ovens
with no automatic timers, and cars without computerised insides, machinery was
fairly simple. But today, machines know things. They have an inbuilt sense of
who is using them. They can tell the difference from a woman gently lifting it
out of the cupboard and onto a tidy bench to use, and a man yanking it off the
shelf and dumping it down somewhere after using his forearm to clear the
clutter off the bench. Machines just know this stuff now. And they will not
work for a woman.
I have had
so many experiences with machines, where I tried to use something, and it sat
there, showing passive resistance, not talking, just refusing to turn on. Occasionally
it would almost start, and then grind to a halt, never to move again. Well,
that is, not until a man entered the room. If you are a woman, how many times
has the man in your life come to ‘fix’ a machine, only to find that it works perfectly
the first time he tries it? How many times have you vented your justifiable frustration
on a stupid machine that is obviously ready for the heap, only to find that the
man of your dreams just has to touch it for the motor to work perfectly until
he exits the room? Frequently, I am sure.
The person
who put this question to me, has to be a man. No woman would ever describe a
machine as ‘soulful’. No, it must have been a man for whom machines just purr
along. So, after this rather lengthy explanation I have to say that I do not
own any ‘soulful’ or ‘human-like’ machines, although I could stretch a point
and say that many of them act like recalcitrant children, naughty in the
extreme. And I am sure that you will now understand why none of this is actually
my fault. Rather, I am the product of my parenting, and having been instilled
with the necessary female art of learned helplessness, I blame my mother for
this.
