The unexpurgated version…..
“You lied about the wi-fi,” said an angry note in Beverley Minster’s donations box.
That’s all there was: a yellow gift-aid envelope with a message scrawled in shouty capital letters, but it said a lot.
What had prompted this complaint was a notice near our front door, offering visitors the option to download information about the building into their mobile phones. This app has been designed to help visitors who come in when there isn’t a welcomer around to hand them a leaflet.
It’s all terribly 21st century – and free – but, thanks to the unreliability of the service provided into the Minster by Kingston Communications (a problem they seem unable to sort out at present) it doesn’t always work.
Our unknown visitor (I suspect it was a ‘he’) had taken this badly and their petulant outburst revealed what I would describe as an overdeveloped sense of entitlement.
We old-timers take such things in our stride. After all, our experience over the first five or six decades of our time on this planet shows us that life itself is unreliable.
I grew up at a time when the quality of TV reception at the seaside was dependent on whether or not the tide was in.
Cars needed constant attention: blankets had to be draped over the engine during cold nights (and woe-betide the rushing driver who didn’t remember to take them off before driving) while starting them was always a tense moment.
Clockwork watches ran slow or fast, biros leaked ink if you didn’t keep moving them around, perforations on toilet paper were erratic and the quality of vegetables at the corner shop was extremely variable. Things have improved since then.
Perhaps as a response to this there are now many people who expect perfection, they want it now, and also demand that it should be free.
It’s the internet that’s done it, providing instant access to a growing amount of information and images. In the explosive and random anarchy of the electronic world there are virtually no cost or editorial barriers to people uploading whatever they want,
If I want a high quality ‘copy’ of a recent movie then I don’t need to go to Amazon or WH Smith: I can just search the internet and get it for free.
It’s a paradise for hippies and freeloaders but, quite frankly, it’s a bad and unsustainable trend.
Until we arrive in the Star Trek universe where money is completely redundant and we get food and figure-hugging red jumpers as we need them then we still have to buy things.
The only way to earn ‘credit’ (unless we’re all given everything from the magic money tree) is to sell our time, energy, products and possibly our imagination to someone who wants them.
Now automation has already removed most demand for skilled labour on assembly lines. Electronic programs are wiping out trained administrators in sectors like financial services or record-keeping – in fact skilled jobs are vanishing in all areas, leaving only vacancies for minimum wage shelf-stackers and servers of one kind or another.
If the free internet makes it impossible for another swathe of the population to earn money by making films, writing books, producing newspapers, making music or developing art then we have an even greater supply of minimum wage fodder cramming the labour market and driving down living standards.
The current generation who expect everything for free will have to learn to pay for things – maybe only a few pennies at a time – but actually transferring money for what they want to the people who produced it.
Maybe you’ll start this process with me. I’ll set up a PayPal account if you like.
The Pickford Papers 