There I was driving behind a big tipper truck full of dirt, emblazoned with the company name and motto: “DIRT-TEK – For all your dirt technology needs phone 1-800-DIRT”
I imagine there is a lot of technology associated with dirt.
Soil ecologists, environmental scientists and farmers spend their lifetimes working out the tech aspects of how dirt produces food. It’s a God given miracle really. Add seeds and water to dirt and more often than not, in time, something edible, beautiful or useful will appear.
But there is another side to dirt and tech.
Here’s the dirt on dirt: dirt hates technology. In a tech world, dirt is anti-tech and it wages a guerrilla war on the technology of the world in many grubby and devious ways.
The biggest cause of phones not working, computer screens going blank and keys not opening car doors is …. dirt.
“Oh yeah, your iPhone, it was filled up with dirt” said the phone repairer. ‘No wonder it didn’t work too well.”
The sheepish i-owner offered his confession: “I was in the garden watching a YouTube video about how to dig a hole in the ground and I guess my phone got buried under a pile of dirt. I had to get my wife’s phone to call my phone, to find out where it was.”
“Yeah, that’s the usual story” said the serviceman. “Why people don’t buy dirt proof iPhone covers I’ll never know – like this one we’ve got for sale for only $69.95”.
Recently our laptop computer screen went blank. Not a blue screen of death, dreaded by Windows users throughout the universe since Windows began, but a black screen of death. Nothing to see here on this computer. Zero. Zip. Nix. Nothing.
We plugged in our spare $10 external monitor that we bought at a garage sale so we could see what we should have been able to see, but couldn’t. We searched the internet for a solution. Most of these fixes required a total rebuild of the computer including taking out the battery and reinstalling it. This process takes about 3 days to do, now that laptops, like electric cars, are built around the battery. A modern laptop has to be practically torn limb from limb in order to replace the battery. The battery is a laptop’s most vulnerable component and is always the first part to fail. Makes sense to bury it deep. Dollars and cents that is, for the manufacturer and repairer.
Anyway, the manufacturer’s website told us that dirt can get into the connection between the laptop screen and the laptop body, causing the screen to go blank. We were caught in the crossfire of the dirty war that dirt is constantly waging on technology.
The solution? Not expensive cleaning with an ear wax removal micro suction device (yes they really do exist). The fix is to ”open and close the lid two or three times to dislodge the dirt”. We did it and it worked !
Two or three pivots of the screen and the screen came back to life. No more black screens on the laptop and blank stares at one other. Now we could watch more cheerless pandemic news followed by puppy videos to cheer us up.
You may wonder how dirt stopped my car key from working. The mighty Mazda 2, now 8 years old, has a remote control button on the key contraption for opening the doors. The door opener still works well despite me dropping it in the garden several times as I walked to and from the car carrying bags of – you guessed it – dirt. Actually, I was carrying potting mix, the world’s most expensive soil and the major world habitat of fungus gnats.
But the dirt had another point of attack on my car key. Be warned, dirt is devious as well as dangerous when any form of technology is in its sights.
My car unlocking tech gadget has a swing-out key that tucks into the body of the gadget when not needed. This key spends a lot of time in my filthy pockets so the slot for the key filled up with dirt and lint. It is quite possible a crop of field mushrooms is growing in there. As a result of the dirt infiltration, the key got completely stuck in its holder, a casualty of dirt’s war on technology. I could open the door of the car with the push-button remote but I could not start the car without the key.
Like unseen malaria parasites crippling the human body, dirt had quietly infiltrated my key device and paralyzed it.
“Can’t fix it” said the repairer. “You need a complete new key and remote. Probably cost you about $170. You really should vacuum out the key slot after every use and spray in a little contact cleaner, $25 for a spray can. Don’t use oil, it attracts dirt. Dirt will destroy a unit like that over time”.
Dirt is intent on destroying our technology. Dirt’s deepest desire is to push us back to living in caves and tilling the soil with our hands to survive, forcing us to give dirt the respect it yearns for.
I must go now, my doctor booked me in for a Dead Sea mud bath to cure my dermatitis caused by my allergy to dirt. After that I have to clean the dirt out of my laptop, my phone, my car keys, my 15 remote controls, my printer, my coffee grinder and my collection of four-colour retractable ball-point pens.
© Geoff Milton 2020
