As the relentless march of technology rides roughshod over us, human beings inevitably yearn for the good old days when the world was young and there were only two flavours of ice cream. Today, many of us are being forced by the consumer electronic industry to carry a plethora of gadgets on our person. Millions of years hence, when archaeologists dig up the perfectly preserved fossilised skeletal remains of a young adult urban-dwelling homo erectus male, they will know it is you because the specimen will be found buried with a Sony Ericsson T610 cameraphone in the vicinity of your hip, an iPod on your rib cage with two wires still stuck to the sides of your skull, a palm pilot organiser clutched by the meta-tarsals, a 32 megabyte flashcard necklace and two socketbombs lodged in the pelvic area.
The good news is that there is no need to carry this confusing array of items anymore. Just get yourself the multi-purpose Palmrazorphone Superturbo LX-cum-Selforganiser, the one doodah that serves as an electric shaver and mobile phone with a built-in WAP-enabled palmbook and vacuum port to suck up dandruff, a portable iron for the travelling executive that can double up in Bluetooth vibrator mode, a laser pointer for your powerpoint presentation that can also be used to guide missiles to selected ground targets and a cattle prod feature when cruising on the wild side.
This is what Convergence is all about: the coming together of different types of technologies in one simple gizmo that bridges the digital divide between the haves and have mores. I have been flipping through the 2,500 page manual for my new Palmrazorphone Superturbo LX and can't help but marvel at how it allows me to multitask.
For instance, while shaving in the Pivoted Head mode with the Long-hair Trimmer activated, I am alerted by a fire-engine siren if there is incoming voicemail. I can take this call by pressing 1 and moving the cursor to Settings and the Shave 'n' Talk toggle and press Select. The caller hears a loud buzzing sound and immediately hangs up thinking there is a large insect inside his head.
If you want to take a picture of yourself vacuuming up the dandruff from your coat collar while on a business trip and transmit it to your not-so-near and dear ones then this is the phone for you. Carefully lift the Palmrazorphone from its housing by pressing the Lift lever, scroll to Camera in the LCD monitor by going to the Function Menu Wizard, scroll to Favourites and Create Now appears, press Yes, No, or Maybe and you'll get a Self-Portrait prompt, press Yes, New Account appears, press No, Are You Just About Finished appears, select yes, then pick an account type from a list of 286 options and make sure you are on a GSM connectivity compatible to the GPRS standard back home, and finally put the razor on the Self-timer Whisker Trim mode which makes the darn thing leap out of your hand as if it had a life of its own and proceed to mow down both your eye brows. Hard to explain.
The great thing is that the incredible Palmrazorphone can also be set to the Hair Transplant function which automatically plucks body hair from an unwanted region of your anatomy like the buttocks and plunks the seedlings over your newly-harvested eye brows. The beauty of it is that you can record all this for posterity by ensuring that the shaver is on Home Movie mode by pressing the Sideburn Trimmer Button all the way for 2 seconds until the razor starts shooting and recording sound. Should you get an incoming call while you are doing all this, go to Voice Control in Functions and say 'Bugger Off' and the call is automatically rejected.
