Why do tools always make me uneasy?

Why is it that, even though I write dithyrambs on human ingenuity – arguing that evermore –complicated gadgets are our vocation -- real tools always mystify me?

Take the quintessential 20th-century invention: the motorcar. The aeroplane cannot compete. For we have failed to bring it down to earth for mass use. The computer ditto.

Yet, although I am a 20th-century person, I have never learnt to drive. As long as I have owned such a machine, I have employed a driver. It heavily taxes an old technology called the pocket. But, it seems certain, the pocket, like most things, was invented for the taxman.

Yes, I read widely on astrophysics, quantum science and the genome. In. imagination, I even skipper the magical inter-galactic spacecraft into which science fiction gels this knowledge. Yet I remain deeply ignorant of nature's simplest form of motion: the mechanics of the car.

Of course, it would be suicidal for me to drive. After Four- Thirty, as novelist David Maillu knows, my throat is as dry as Kitui. I can swallow the whole Lake Victoria bottoms up.

In Oar, I used to tickle colleague lain Christie by swearing, only half in jest, that Scotch and Alison were the best inventions Caledonia ever made, the one always double, the other Little but dainty.

I have long been weaned off the Little one. But the spirit of Scotland abideth (though my doctor has recently slapped a one-year ban in favour of my liver). Thus, by the time I limp out of my pub, I am full to overflowing.

In a city where futuristic commuter spacecraft called matatu zoom at rates that, fly in the face of Albert Einstein's light speed limit (causing the tachyon to trundle like Mzee Kobe), to get behind the wheel of my jalopy under such "influence" is to invite Mister Toad's road spectacles ..

I take heart, though, that a great fellow editor, the boon coon George Mbugguss, has never propelled a car in his life. Kwame Nkrumah, the Osagyefo no less, had to wait till his overthrow and exile in Conakry to tame that beast.

Pathetic excuses! For the fact is simply that I was born maladroit. When I worked for Unicef in Geneva in the 70s, companion Rosemary often subjected me to amiable rebuke for the inordinate fumbling with which I handled even the simplest device.

Why do tools always make me uneasy?

I learn, however, that at the onset of a drastic technological change, I am by no means alone. Most of my generation of scribes resisted as fiercely as I the abrupt changeover from the manual typewriter to the computer.

Sudden change disturbs your mental repose beyond measure. You cling tenaciously to the tools you have grown up with. It might have filled design magus John McHaffie with horror to be told to drop the time-honoured page layout method - with a paper dummy"a ruler and a felt pen - to turn to a new-fangled technique called Page maker or Pagespeed, an exceedingly hard merchandise alleged to be a "software"!

Yet, though, once you have made the plunge, there's no looking back, you often pay a heavy price for what Anthony Smith called The Paperless Revolution. I have often caused Wangethi Mwangi no end of grief with a spell-binding "skill" masqueraded as a "spell-check".

Mbugguss might testify, too, that the withdrawal syndrome can be long and painful. It took me donkey's years to pluck up the courage to send my first message by fax. The e-mail culture still baffles me. True, Juliette Akinyi, a woman I fathered when I was a student in Chicago many years ago and whom I have not seen since she was six months old, has recently traced me through a new form of witchcraft called Internet.

Yes, the Web proves right scientist Arthur Clarke's dictum that technology, when it reaches a certain level, cannot be distinguished from juju. It is thus that white "New Age"

Egyptologists have expropriated our Great Pyramid and used it to turn ancient black gods against the Negro race.

Yet, ever since Joe Mbuthia and Angela Gacheru introduced me to e-mail wizardry, Angie has taken it upon herself to remind me daily to send that e-mail greeting to Juliette Akinyi in Los Angeles.

As I was saying, mine is the Grand Canyon between thinking and tool-using.

If Omni magazine's futuristic high-tech thingumabobs greatly thrill my brain, a real tool, however primitive, will always benumb my fingers.

This article is part of a series republishing Philip Ochieng’s long-running Sunday Nation column.