I’ve always found I’ve got most energy in the mornings.
So, if I’m really busy, that’s when I like to work at home.
There are no distractions and it’s usually more productive.
After about lunchtime I start to wind down a bit.
So that’s a good time to go into the office and have any meetings.
A few years ago, I realised I’d left a script at home.
So I called home and spoke to our cockney cleaning lady.
I said, “Carol, can you see if there’s a script lying on the dining room table?”
After a couple of minutes she found it.
I asked her to fax it to me.
She said she’d never used a fax machine.
So I talked her through feeding the paper into the machine, dialling the number and pressing send.
Then I went and stood by the office fax machine.
After a few minutes it rang and the script came out.
While I was checking it, the fax machine rang again.
And another script came out.
As I walked away it rang again, and another script came out.
Then it rang again, and another script came out.
I called home and a very flustered Carol answered.
I asked her what was going on.
She said, “Oh David I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.
I keep putting the script in, but it keeps coming out again.”
See technology is obvious once you know how it works.
But if you don’t, it isn’t.
I always remember my granny watching the early days of commercial TV.
She was watching a film and it ended and went straight into the adverts.
My granny carried on watching.
Then the News started with Big Ben striking.
Finally my granny looked up and said, “That was a bloody funny ending, wasn’t it?”
Because no one told her they were adverts, she thought she was still watching the film.
She couldn’t work out why some bloke had appeared from nowhere and what the chocolates had to do with anything.
Every generation understands their own technology.
When you grow up with something you accept it as the norm.
It’s just part of your environment.
When new things appear later in life, you have to adapt and change.
And learning that way is harder.
I’m too lazy for that.
So any problems on the computer, anything that takes longer than two seconds to understand, I phone my son.
He usually logs on to my laptop, from wherever he is, and fixes it remotely on screen while I watch.
See I can’t fix it because I can’t get a spanner on it.
That’s my generation.
He once asked me, “Dad, how come you don’t understand computers?”
I said, “The same reason you don’t know how a four-stroke engine works.”
In my generation everything was mechanical.
Everything hit, pulled, turned or stopped something else.
Everything could be fixed by being tightened or loosened, filed or oiled.
Everything was logical.
Everything had a reason.
You could see how it worked and you could affect it directly.
So that governed our thinking: structure and reason, logic and argument.
Cause and effect.
This technology isn’t like that.
You can’t see why anything does anything.
You have to take it on trust, and that’s governed everyone’s thinking.
It’s not about logic anymore.
That’s dinosaur thinking.
It’s about making things seem more complicated.
Not about making them simpler.
It’s about feelings, and moods, and conversations, and engagement, and long words that no one quite understands fully, but you trust they work because they sound impressive.
Maybe that’s what’s wrong with advertising at the moment.
We can’t get a spanner on it.