Lost iPhone that shows the Luddites aren't on the money over new tech

My father and I have been engaged for at least a decade in an argument about technology.

‘It never works,’ his thesis goes.

‘No, you don’t know how to work it,’ goes mine.

Take the other day when we were returning from a sojourn in Mallorca and he approached the Palma Airport e-gate with his passport the wrong way round in his hand.

‘You need to turn it round or it won’t work,’ I told him.

He rotated the document through 90 degrees when it should have been 180 – whereupon, with more impatience than I’d intended, I snatched it from his hand, placed it in the correct position for insertion into the scanner and clamped his palm over the top of it.

Flight connections were missed this week due to faulty E-gate systems

‘There. Now it will work.’

He approached the machine and presented his passport exactly as I’d shown him.

It didn’t work.

He extracted it and re-inserted it.

A red light flashed.

The gate did not open.

The process was repeated with the same result five or six times as passengers queuing behind him gave up the ghost and chose another e-gate, each getting through first time.

At length a supervisor arrived and placed the passport in my father’s hand just as I had done minutes earlier and guided it into the scanner. No dice.

‘This machine broken,’ he declared and motioned my father to the neighbouring one before wandering away to offer half-hearted support to other blameless souls the system had taken against.

Entirely predictably, the neighbouring e-gate didn’t work either – at least not for the first eight or nine tries.

Finally, for no reason I could discern, it decided to mess with my father’s head no further.

‘I didn’t do anything different that time,’ he said as the gates slid open.

I believed him. ‘See? Technology never works.’

It was the wrong moment to argue.

We landed in Glasgow and, moments off the plane, faced another e-gate.

Once again, I placed the passport in the correct position in my father’s hand and, once again, steeled myself for the chaos which would inevitably ensue before he was cleared for egress.

It was open sesame first time.

‘Looks like technology works fine here,’ I remarked.

‘Even you sailed through.’

That was a couple of days before a malfunction crashed the e-gate system across the UK, wreaking pandemonium on multiple airports, including Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Families were left waiting for hours with no food and water.

Flight connections were missed.

Border Force staff were drafted in to process every passport manually and, of course, there weren’t enough of them because they rely on machines to do their work.

By the time many cleared passport control it was the early hours and the lack of transport options meant some had to bed down in the terminal for the night.

Others remained trapped on planes until the queues in arrivals halls cleared.

I do not need to discuss this event with my father to hear his commentary.

I already hear the fatalistic note of satisfaction at the arrival of fresh evidence proving what he has said all along, that automation is our downfall, society is wedded to it and anyone with any sense should seek an annulment.

If you look for it, corroboration for his claims is everywhere.

It’s in the post offices which periodically tell me they can’t sell me euros because ‘the system is down’.

Selling foreign currency didn’t used to depend on a system.

It’s in the car park that won’t let me in for my car because the scanner can’t read the barcode on my ticket.

It’s in the button you push not to talk to someone in the car park but someone in an office in the south of England who has to ‘load the system’ before she can unlock the door for you.

‘I’m sorry,’ she tells me. ‘The system isn’t loading.’

It’s in the supermarkets now moving swiftly towards dispensing with check-out operators entirely because it’s cheaper to compel us to scan our own groceries.

Each of these godforsaken pits of automated tills (few of which accept cash and, even if they do, probably won’t accept yours) is a battleground of groans and beeps. It’s human will versus digital rule and we get to buy our shopping only if technology says we do.

It’s in the banks axing their branches.

TSB announced this week it was closing 36 more, nine of them in Scotland.

Most people are doing their banking digitally, they say.

Yes, and many of them are tearing their hair out because of it.

‘Hmm, something went wrong,’ my banking app likes to tell me. ‘Please try again later.’

‘What went wrong?’ I want to ask, but ‘something went wrong’ is all you get.

You phone them up and a recorded message says you’d be better off using the app.

Even when the app works, security measures are now so labyrinthine you’d be almost as quick making the 20-minute walk to your branch – if they hadn’t binned it – and you’d feel a deal less antsy about being locked out of your account.

And yet, an episode from our trip to Mallorca makes me hesitate to accept that the Luddites are on the money all the way as we charge into some unwinnable final reckoning with technology.

I left my phone on the counter of an ironmonger in Port d’Andratx and was in a café three miles away before I realised I didn’t have it.

I borrowed a mobile to call the shop.

Did they have it? ‘No, señor.’

Panic swept over me.

My boarding cards were on the phone. My bank cards too. All my contacts.

I couldn’t begin to tell you anybody’s number.

My phone knows them all. My Whats-Apps were on the device.

My photographs. My two-year streak on Duolingo, which I use to learn Spanish.

Oh, and it isn’t even my phone. It’s work’s.

Once again, I could hear my father’s unspoken commentary.

‘Well, if you weren’t so married to technology, you wouldn’t be in this mess. It always goes wrong.’

I couldn’t begin to tell you anybody’s number. My phone knows them all, writes Jonathan Brocklebank

I raced back to the ironmonger hoping it had been found.

It hadn’t. Blank faces all round.

So that seemed to be that: phone stolen; holiday officially a disaster.

Until the youngest member of staff piped up in fluent English.

‘Do you have another Apple device, like an iPad?’ I did indeed.

‘You can use Find My. I’ll show you.’

Within seconds we were consulting a digital map of the town, with my phone showing up in a part of it I hadn’t been to that day.

Was it a café? I had visions of walking to it and demanding that everyone turn out their pockets.

But it turned out to be the port authority office.

I marched in and told them in my best Duolingo Spanish that my iPad said my iPhone was here.

‘Si, señor,’ they said and produced it immediately.

Someone had handed it in. I almost wept with relief.

‘Technology never works, eh?’ I said to my father.

‘That phone was a goner if it weren’t for a kid in an ironmonger who knew how to work technology.’

He harrumphed.

The debate continues.

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