Here is a list of the gadgets in my home that I do not know how to work: one Casio digital camera (can someone please explain why it won’t take the ****ing memory card?); one integrated dishwasher (it seems to depend on a totally random sequence of button-pushing to make it work); one Psion organiser (after a solid week of transferring data from phone, computer, address book and diary, it crashed and wiped the lot). I also have an power drill that I am too scared to use; an iPod that, for some reason, plays for only 30 minutes; a DVD player that is supposedly recordable, although God knows how; and an all-in-one remote control that I lost six months ago and still can’t find.
In fact, the only gadgets I do know how to work are my GHD hair straighteners (on/off button, and that’s it) and my Sky+ (except when it breaks down, in which case you phone the helpline, and the operators are tremendously helpful. Apparently, you have to turn it off and on again).
What’s weird is that, gadgets aside, women are very good at operating things. After all, they can pull together a roast dinner (that’s at least seven different parts all brought together in a miraculous climax). Put them in a department store they have never entered before, and they instinctively know the most direct route to the Mac nude lip liner and the 15-denier stockings. As for turning things on, most girls could convince even the most irate policeman that their dangerous driving was simply a temporary and quite unique aberration of an otherwise perfectly charming woman. But gadgets? Uh-uh.
Not that this has had any effect on the world of fast-moving consumer goods. They continue to bombard us with electrical appliances, safe in the knowledge that, when we see them on the shelves, we’ll realise that we just cannot do without. The latest to catch my eye comes from Philips: it is a pubic hair-trimmer. In pink. Presumably hoping to cash in on the current craze for Brazilian waxes, the Dutch electronics firm seems to think we will want to part with £19.99 in order to take a pair of painful-looking clippers to our nether regions to fashion “a heart, a star or the name of our loved one”. Hmm. I wonder how thick the instruction book is?
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Shane Watson returns next week