Do YOU know what time it is?

Whatever Happened to All the Clocks? 

Every self-respecting town square used to have one. Now everyone's supposed to look at their cell phones. The clock tower once bound the townsfolk together in shared chronological awareness. Now there's no tower to orient by (in space or in time), only the gadget in the pocket. But the cellphone-free holdouts never quite know what the time is ...
http://www.short-humour.org.uk/10writersshowcase/youare.htm

Virus Causes Ladder Shortage

If "the first casualty of war is truth", the first casualty of an emergency is civil rights.

Healthy people not diagnosed with any illness are being told to turn their homes into jails and keep themselves imprisoned. Sheep-like, many do. Free-thinkers are in danger of being criminalized. The concept of personal adult decision-making is fragile, likely to collapse at the first puff of panic.

This has led to unintended consequences. Everyone has forgotten the shortage of masks due to a new shortage: ladders. People jailed at home have taken to their roofs as platforms for fresh air and a view of something other than a computer screen. To get up there, they've bought all the ladders. Suppliers are running out. Even people afraid of heights and without roofs have stockpiled some "just in case".

Unfortunately some roofs are steep and an increasing number of jail-breakers have fallen off them. Injured, they've had to be taken to hospitals where they're filling beds that might be wanted for virus patients, so Government has issued a new bulletin: 

LADDER PURCHASES FORBIDDEN. TRESPASSING ON YOUR OWN ROOF IS A CRIME. TEAMS WILL BE SENT OUT WITH BINOCULARS TO FIND HOUSEHOLDERS DEFYING THIS PROHIBITION. EXPECT FINES OR JAIL TIME -- AS IN, HOUSE ARREST. (PM clarifies - sort of: You can't be sent to public jail because you're not allowed to congregate publicly. If you didn't want to be sentenced to house arrest, you should have stayed inside.)

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Health Officer Recommends --To escape Covid-19 AVOID DIGITAL DEVICES

Ha! Scared you, didn't I? Although the virus does indeed land on surfaces like keyboards and smartphones, they aren't telling us to "stay away from crowded websites" yet, or "maintain distance from computers".
What would life be like if they did, if "computer virus" became a biological as well as a digital thing?
What if the Chief Medical Officer told everyone "YOU MUST IMMEDIATELY DISTANCE YOURSELF FROM YOUR COMPUTER BEFORE IT KILLS YOU"? Imagine the panic then - and the wailing about the economy.
Maybe we'd spend more time outdoors, enjoying nature and fresh air, and less hunched over our digital devices. That would be healthier indeed.
Maybe, without email, we'd communicate with hand-written notes, dropping them into each others' mail slots like characters were forever doing in Victorian novels.
We could have message boards in every community -- physical ones that is, on suitable walls.
We could escape the group-herding of Facebook, the mindless trash-talk of Twitter, the surveillance of Google.
This is looking better by the minute. Maybe we'd learn to remember things again, instead of just Googling them. We'd keep mind and memory in our brains instead of out-sourcing them.
We'd avoid the prison camp of Smart Cities like the one Google-Alphabet is planning for Toronto's Waterfront district -- a prison worse than any hospital, one where it's civil rights that are on life-support.
We would no longer be stalked by our devices which track us around cities and stores, reporting our movements to police and advertisers alike.
Maybe the old-fashioned Soap Box Orator would come back to the parks and squares -- anyone with ideas to share would stand up and speak, keeping free speech alive in the "agora". (Stand at the edge of the crowd to listen, if you insist on avoiding physical contact -- at least you could get to see the faces of other regulars. Actual facial recognition!)
Being outside so much we could watch birds coming and going, and the colours of trees changing, and at night notice the movement of moon and stars.
I don't know about everyone else but I'm feeling healthier already! I do get the irony of what I'm saying though: I'm telling you online how great it would be if we all went offline. So far it's but a health-work-in-progress. But thanks for the possibility, "corona" virus: if only you really did crown our lives with this silver lining.


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