When I heard about half the world grinding to a halt after a software glitch on Friday, my first thought was that annoying Paul Kelly song From Little Things Big Things Grow.
My second thought, a nanosecond later, was about how it might affect my food supply.
Nothing else really matters.
As it turned out, The Boss had cash on him so he could pay for my chicken legs at the supermarket, although he told me plenty of people were abandoning their shopping trolleys at the checkout because they couldn’t pay for their groceries.
I nodded my approval. It could have been a disaster if he was relying on his credit card, and he needs to embed this lesson deeply in his brain: cash is still king when the chips are down.
Mind you, he’s been grumbling about the number of times he goes to use his credit card and sees a demand for a surcharge of 1.5 per cent or two per cent or even 2.5 per cent. He reckons the banks and big retailers are the ones that don’t want the worry of handling cash and have gradually encouraged people to use credit cards by getting rid of signatures, then allowing tap-and-pay, then enabling payment with a phone.
Having succeeded in that, they now turn around and sneak in extra charges because all this technology designed to make things easier for the banks and supermarkets ends up being expensive.
Which is another reason, I tell him, to go back to cash. Like an alpha dog, control your destiny, son!
He’s too reliant on technology, The Boss, and needs to get back to basics, like spending more time giving me scratches, hurling sticks across the river to fetch and following me on long walks through the bush.
As you know, dogs everywhere thought COVID-19 to be a net positive for dogs, while it lasted. Now we’re all waiting for the grid to go down, so humans are without power for a week or two. Preferably longer.
That way, their phones will run out and they won’t be able to recharge them. They won’t be able to watch TV, use social media, take selfies or communicate, unless they talk to each other directly.
Imagine if they can’t get cash out of an ATM and the EFTPOS machines stop working. But it is bound to happen, sooner or later, with our intelligence services already suggesting state-sanctioned hackers from China and elsewhere are exploring energy grids and other infrastructure, looking for weaknesses and possibly planting disabling viruses that can be activated at some future date.
So my question for The Boss is this: what have you done to prepare for this eventuality and guarantee my dinner for the foreseeable future?
My bet is nothing at all. The thing about humans is that they nourish the cause and curse the effect — and The Boss is firmly in that category. Now that everything seems to be working again he’ll forget it and go back to employing all the lazy convenience that technology offers him — and ignore the warning signals.
Back to tap-and-pay, the podcast and the emails and WhatsApp. Next thing he’ll be looking at one of those electric vehicles and crossing his fingers that the grid will keep working.
I haven’t even bothered to remind him that the country only has three week’s supply of petrol because we don’t refine it anymore. I wonder if he can still shoot a rabbit? Woof!