Last month, something very odd happened. My husband’s phone started doing the strangest things, like declaring McDonald’s as his favourite restaurant, calling random people in his phone directory, opening and closing apps arbitrarily, moving through screens at some absurdly ridiculous speed. He was completely flummoxed, while I wondered if someone had hacked his phone somehow. We tried many fixes, from restarting the phone several times to doing a hard reset on it. Nothing worked.
Then we contacted Apple Support and were told that his phone was suffering from ‘ghost touch’. Simply put, ‘ghost touch’ is what happens when the iPhone screen moves or starts doing things on its own. It seems to react to non-existent touches and starts doing stuff without the user having touched anything. It took several calls and a visit to the Apple Store to fix the phone finally.
But why am I still thinking about it? Furthermore, why am I talking to you about it?
Well, the last couple of years have felt like some kind of giant glitch, a ghost-touched world, where a virus and its many incarnations have upended our lives in so many little and large ways. Just when you think you’ve got to grips with it, another mutation rears its head, and we’re off again, looking for solutions, for ways to protect ourselves, our loved ones and our livelihoods. The worst bit is the sense of helplessness, of not knowing how to rectify whatever is going wrong, and hoping that whatever fixes we are applying will be the right ones, and that they will hold.
I wish there was an Apple Store one could go to and get the world repaired. Alas, there isn’t.
Luckily for me, as a writer, I can escape into another world, an alternate reality where even if things aren’t perfect, at least there isn’t a mutant virus on the loose. A pre-pandemic world where the only concerns my characters have are the normal, everyday worries that most people harbour.
As 2021 comes to a close, all I wish for is a hard reset. A world that can go back to being its usual chaotic, frenetic, beautiful, messy, wonderful self; where we don’t live in daily fear of an invisible enemy that has ghost-touched our lives.
Is that too much to hope for? I sure hope not.
