It should have been a simple thing really. My wife, Sheila, to whom I have been wed for well over 30 years, decided she would like to go swimming.
Excellent. It’s good for her health and, as she will undoubtedly go along with a few mates, will enhance her social scene at the same time. Good.
We are also fortunate in having a public swimming pool only a couple of miles from our front door. It’s new, all bright and shiny, part of a much bigger leisure centre with super-fit, permanently grinning staff, wearing corporate uniforms, determined to help you achieve the body beautiful through the simple matter of crossing their palms with silver then staying home and never actually attending the torture chamber. I think that’s the idea anyway.
Booking, of course, is a breeze. I remember the old days when you had to climb into your car, drive to the centre, stand for 20 minutes in a queue to speak to a surly youth who clearly thought trying to knock a body like yours into shape would be a waste of time, then try to find the right money because he had run out of change (never actually had any of course). But now we are in the 21st century, the communication age. It’s a time when all things are possible at the mere stab of a digit. No problem. Will be done in a jiffy.
First stop is the website of course. Ahhh! Which website? 20 years ago it was just known as The Leisure Centre. Now it’s been taken over by corporate whiz kids and has a new name, which I don’t know, and which almost certainly has no relationship to the local area and is probably a three-letter acronym. But which three? I hear you say, ‘the stupid old fool, just Google ‘leisure centres near me’ and you’ll find it’. If only it were that simple. It’s a corporation, with centres all over the country, and a few elsewhere I suspect. Even then it’s not just a question of scrolling down to find our home town, clicking on the location and going to ‘book swimming’. Oh no! That would be far too easy.
No, before you can have the privilege of spending your hard-earned cash with this corporate leviathan, you must ‘Register’. Joy of joys! Like most customers there is little I enjoy more than registering my entire life story with a bunch of Muppets I don’t know, and don’t wish to know, just so my Mrs can go for a dip with her mates. But register one must.
Having entered 15 pages of information, all of which, with the possible exception of her name, was irrelevant, we reached crunch time. The ‘Confirm’ button. Off went the device into a whirl of spinning things before finally informing us that she was already registered under that e-mail address so everything we had done before was superfluous. Oh, how we laughed! Now all we had to do was work out which password she might have used 10 years ago when she last went for a few lengths of breast stroke. No problem.
Time went by. Memories came and went of her long-passed mother’s maiden name, the name of her first pet, her favourite band and a string of alpha-numeric concoctions with only vague relevance to anything. Then, by pure chance, she hit on something. The system went into yet another tail spin and proclaimed, in glorious scarlet font, that the e-mail address she had used was invalid.
Now forgive me. I am a patient man. But if the e-mail address was invalid, how did the blasted system know she had used it to register in the past? Is it me?
It was about this time that I had a brain wave. Nothing if not resourceful, that’s me. I hopped in the car, drove the five minutes to the hall of torment, stood in the 20-minute queue and spoke kindly to the spotty youth over the counter. Problem solved. Isn’t it a joy to live in such progressive times.
Sheila had a lovely swim.