Happy Belated Birthday, Sam

There is a vile myth going around that anything small has its great value. Cameras are getting smaller by the day, computers are going lighter, mobile phone are so small that it is, and I am not joking, rumoured the latest generation of 3.55G is wafer thin and measures approximately 1.1005 nano metre. I am not sure if I am the only people who have this mentality but I think nano-scale technologies totally suck. Why are we paying more for something smaller and lower in material cost? I am not complaining I am merely being grumpy as I aged.

If things are made and manufactured in nano-scale, the accompanying manual is likely to be even smaller. The last time I read a manual for my bed-side alarm clock, it was like trying to ‘count’ the number of legs a millipede has (and I can assure you that no known millipedes have more than 400 legs). I gave up roughly 2 sentences below the welcome line. It is impossible to read at my age, no matter how hard I tried to focus.

Nano-scale technologies are probably a living nightmare to people of my generation. The generation of people who, may be forgiven, if they fervently abhor the word ‘old’ but, is old enough to experience presbyopia. I don’t recollect my father having problems reading when he was in his forties! Prints then were as big as a bullock-cart and nothing smaller was acceptable.

My worse ire is reserved for the publishers who notoriously print small fonts for the sake of saving one or two trees, or so they claimed! I would stretch the newspaper at arm’s length and still unable to read the smaller prints of my favorite advertisements. You know, the buy one get two followed by the subscript * gimmicks. What is printed under *, you will never get to find out unless you beg others to read for you. And then you naturally went into a total disappointment after learning you need to spend a fortune to qualify……. Or you may be seen behaving like a perfect jerk in the supermarket adjusting the product to enable enough reflection to read those small fonts. Chances then are, you will find longer words that are likely to be beyond your comprehension or you simply cannot pronounce them. In which case it would be immaterial whether you are able read or read but unable to understand them.

People suffering from presbyopia often experience similar symptoms. You can’t differentiate s, z or 2. The number 5, 6, or 8 looks the same no matter how hard you adjust it. As a frequent traveler, I have trouble filling embarkation form whenever I enter a country.
A I have to balance the little sheet of carbon paper on my passport and write with my pen which is likely to run out of ink without fail.
B You are likely to erroneously fill ‘date of birth’ and ‘country of birth’ wrongly.
C The space allocated is always narrower that the words you fill in (subconsciously you hand-writing gets bigger with the degree of presbyopia).
D You hand-writing looks as though you just ran the marathon.

Plus, when you are in the hotel, you can never ever read:
A The shampoo or the bath gel. I have learned from experience to rely on colour coding so that I won’t end up using shampoo as bath gel.
B The instructions on how to use the security safe.
C The master console to control the room’s utilities.

And finally, you will find yourself buying extra extra number of spectacles. You may start with one, and then slowly but surely multiply the numbers. And then, unknowingly one day you will realize you have one spectacle in your car, toilet, briefcase, living room, bedroom and a host of endless unimaginable places.

Happy Belated Birthday, Sam. I have a perfect birthday present for you this year. How about another pair of spectacle from the pasar pagi costing a mere 15 ringgit?