Put the blame on Hooch

My almost-life as a tech bro

I thought this morning that I was finally going to have to say goodbye to my beloved iPod.
It’s probably the 10^th I’ve had: the screen is half black, meaning I have to navigate my way round playlists blindly, the body is scratched and you only have to look at it for the battery to go from plump green to thin, tormenting red, but it has all my ‘running’ music on it which is why it’s so precious

For doing treadmill sprints I prefer the iPod to music on my phone because it’s an early model that doesn’t have a volume limiter on it so I can listen to classics such as Sandstorm and Renegade Master at ear-bleeding volume. When I’m tired during a run it only takes a couple of bars of something like a Calvin Harris EDM banger (as I believe they are called) to give me a second wind. The energising rush of the right song at the right time is as close as I get to coming up on something illegal these days.

I was an early adopter of iPods. I bought the original version, which I think was about £300, and spent hours uploading music via its unique firewire cable. I remember feeling like a member of an elite club – when you spotted another person wearing those white earphones there would be a spark of recognition. I also remember people charging others with more money than sense a fortune to upload their CDs onto their iPods.

I haven’t always been an early adopter when it comes to tech and the virtual world, however.

When I first moved back to London from Barcelona in 1996 I did some ad-hoc freelance office admin at a design agency in East London (before it was trendy). I ended up working on a brand identity project for a credit card company. I really liked the person I was working for and the work was OK. The highlight of the week, though, was Friday afternoon when we had to do a load of mail shots in the basement.

We always had a laugh and got to drink free bottles of Hooch, which the agency laid on in plentiful supply.

One day I was called into a meeting for another project. ‘It’s for BT, they want one of those new website things. It’s going to be called btdotcom,’ the account person told me, before asking if I’d like to work on BT.com, doing some copywriting.

When I asked if it meant I wouldn’t be able to work on the other thing, and have fun on a Friday afternoon with free Hooch, I was told it was one or the other.

I chose not to work on btdotcom, so I didn’t get in on the internet thing massively ahead of the crowd. I never ended up commanding a ridiculously high day rate, making enough money to buy one of those new ‘warehouse’ apartments that were all the rage. Hooch was eventually discontinued before making a comeback a couple of years ago, something I’m yet to achieve.

The million dollar question…

I used to do copywriting for Orange, back when the future was theirs. In one memorable meeting, talking about WAP, the precursor to the world wide web on handsets, I furrowed my brow and asked, ‘Why on earth would anyone want the internet on their phone?’

Like everyone else these days my life is heavily reliant on tech. I recently deleted Twitter from my phone because I realised it was sucking the life out of me, but would be lost without my iPhone (12, the screen of which I smashed on the very day I got it.) I have a laptop for personal stuff and an iMac for work and can navigate around Word, Excel (the most anally retentive program invented), PP, InDesign, WordPress and various other modern inventions, but I can still be reduced to tears by the fxcking printer that has gone offline again just when I need to print something vital.