By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in iPod, Laptop, Internet, Apple, Uncategorized on August 12, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Who would have thought that a week and a half of working for an employer would end up with a hospital admission? I’d like to claim exposure to Windows XP was the cause after decades of isolation in the clean, disinfected world of Apple.
It was, however, due entirely to the wonderful British National Health Service who spotted the problem, whisked me in for immediate, free treatment and saved my leg if not my life. The Americans who are fighting so rabidly to prevent even a tiny amount of national health care in the USA must be barking mad.
Perhaps they would prefer something like the wasted technology above my bed in a state of the art ward, which had let in a tiny amount of free enterprise. The end result is patients suffered. We would have preferred to share a tiny 14 inch black and white TV rather than the LCD screens attached to an articulating arm above each bed. Most still had their original plastic wrapping intact because patients weren’t interested.
Price is the cause of their lack of use, with TV access costing £3.50 per day for free-to view channels in a tiny, low-resolution window. Games come for £2 per hour and telephone calls are more expensive than the highest cell-phone tariff. In the corner of the ward is a Dell PC attached to a 15 inch LCD display. It was on but unusable until access had been paid for.
Younger, tech-savvy patients with ipods, 3G phones and the like, sat cut-off from fellow inmates by the earphones we all wore. Older, less well equipped patients were isolated and bored. You could recognise them because their mobile phones were still set to the Nokia default ring tone instead of being switched to silent mode.
Perhaps technology had moved on so rapidly that it caught out the firm who controlled the LCD units. Probably not. They convinced ‘someone’ that their TV systems would be income generators for the hospital. The old and free TVs were whisked away and new gadgets installed in their place.
I found a use for the one above my bed, as a low-level night light, by turning on the screen and pointing it towards the wall. Instead of the gadget forced on me I’d much rather have had wifi access for a reasonable fee so I could have used my own laptop for entertainment. As it was, my tiny iPod Nano filled the gap but gone was the interaction with fellow patients.
Rated: 73.33% (3 votes)
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