Accessories to Life

Doctor, my phone is sick

My dad used a very interesting analogy when bringing his phone to the repair shop. Because my dad couldn’t reproduce the fault, the repairman was not convinced that there was anything wrong with it. So my dad said:

“Look, I’ll only bring in the phone when it’s sick. If it’s not sick, why would I bring the phone to see the doctor?”

The repairman laughed and was suddenly more willing to make the necessary arrangements to take a look at the phone in detail. Humour works… only when used in the right context! Some may not find it funny, or even find it offensive, as there’s some sarcasm hidden in it. Different people, different sense of humour. But what I found most interesting, was the way we describe inanimate objects behaving like human.

A phone is… well just a phone. It doesn’t feel anything. It doesn’t cry. It doesn’t fall sick. It doesn’t feel happy at certain times and angry at other times. It doesn’t feel sleepy or sluggish in the afternoon after lunch. It doesn’t even take lunch. Yet we use these very terms to describe our phone.

1. If it’s running low on battery power, it hasn’t got enough juice. (Phone doesn’t drink.)
2. If it works only at certain times, it’s tempremental. (The phone has no emotions.)
3. If you really hate your phone, you want to kill it! (The phone can’t “die”, technically.)
4. If your phone is no longer working, or the battery power has been used up, or you’re out of your phone’s network coverage, the phone is dead. (See 3.)
5. We dress our phone with covers to “protect” it. (It won’t feel warmer with clothes on.)
6. You change the “skins” of the phone so that it matches more to your personality. (Sounds very much like some couple, with their own matching “HIS t-shirt” and “HER t-shirt”.)

Humanising the phone is helpful to describe the condition of the phone. We are more attuned to how the body feels, and hence we apply the same analogy when describing it to other people. It has a very immediate impact, just like how the repairman understood what my dad said. It also shows how intimate you are with your phone. The more personalised it is, the more you can’t live without your phone! So… how much do you love your phone?

When speaking or writing, we normally unconsciously adopt the same technique. Humanising an object or a situation helps to convey our message across more quickly and effectively. For example, I normally say “the atmosphere is tense” instead of “everyone in the room feels angry and upset but nobody is making a single sound”.

However, sometimes we require the opposite to make us feel better, or feel more in control of the situation. Like how the police will rattle off a report to his boss “accident at 0400 hours, one male aged 23 and one female aged 19, no fatal injury”. The police has effectively “mechanised” the way he speaks to his higher-ranking officer. This way of speaking provides a certain detachment to the current situation. Detachment is sometimes useful, especially when emotions are involved, like how a business mechanises the process of a funeral, mechanisation helps deal with death.

These are the tools we can choose to use whenever we need them. Humanisation or mechanisation. No one technique is more superior to the other. No one technique should be favoured over the other. We require both to function. We have the choice to call upon whichever that suits our particular situation. Just choose wisely.

© 2008 shang lee . com.