Poparazzi
Diary of a home bird
Ciara Galvin
OKAY, so we’ve established the roomies aren’t exactly ‘au fait’ with the ins and outs of the latest technology, but I must admit, they are getting there.
Darwin would have been well impressed viewing an evolutionary-like time lapse of the male roomie, going from his NASA space shuttle-sized car phone of the ’90s, all the way up to his current Samsung smart phone.
Sometimes when I see him replying to a text or accessing his Whatsapp (yes, he has Whatsapp), I begin to imagine David Attenborough commentary on the happenings. “Here we see the male roomie, in his natural habitat, attempting to open a multi-media message.”
Recently the perils of technology came to the fore once again, this time while rushing to a family wedding.
As designated chauffeur to the church and reception, and with timekeeping not being our family’s strong point, I readied Black Beauty (the car) in the driveway and awaited the male roomies’ exit from the house. (On a side note, we three women, who had to get hair, make-up and headpieces together, were still ready ahead of Pops.)
Pops in the front and the female roomie in the back with my sister, we hit for the marriage ceremony, five minutes away, running late, in peak Friday-afternoon traffic.
“Is this on silent,” began the questions. “Sure where is the button that turns it down? I won’t chance bringing it in with me. I won’t need it.”
The roomies were both experiencing some technical difficulties with their respective smart phones. But the sister came to the rescue, curing their technological maladies much to their amazement.
It didn’t end there, however. The male roomie was proud of how the ladies in his life scrubbed up for the occasion and was keen to document us in our ‘rig-outs’. As soon as we were out of the church after the nuptials, he was out with the ‘camera phone’. Now, the male roomie isn’t exactly famed for his photography skills. He’s no Mario Testino by any stretch of the imagination.
When I was on holidays in Australia a few years ago with the roomies, I experienced what it must be like for a major celebrity going about their daily business in the glare of paparazzi. The male roomie must have thought he needed a blow-by-blow account of our trip. He became … Poparazzi. From visiting the Sydney Opera House to eating a Subway sandwich, we were snapped. And he managed to cut our heads off in all the pictures.
Back to the wedding, Pops went snapping but, unsure whether he got our heads in, he asked some bystanders who weren’t at the wedding to do the honours. Then, myself and the sis were tasked with explaining how one would attach a photo to a message … and that’s when the craic really started. Nevertheless, we got there, and so his females colleagues were kept up to date with ‘the shtyle’.
The female roomie’s difficulties with her smart phone are also mostly to do with its multi-media functions. For a while there, one might assume from looking at her photo gallery that she was interested in tile mosaics. It was in fact ‘problems’ with the phone’s camera that resulted in a multitude of pictures of the kitchen floor.
Something tells me that after the roomies read this, though, I could be receiving a picture message of black bags at the door.
In her fortnightly Diary of a Home Bird column, Ciara Galvin reveals the trials and tribulations of a twenty-something year old still living with her parents.