TECHNOPHOBIA

I walked into the meeting room like a badger disturbed from its sett.  Rows of shiny, expectant faces, all waiting for supplication.  I sat down on the chrome and faux-leather seat, very modern and ergonomic and agony for the back.  I put my papers down on the ersatz walnut conference table, about the size of a large trampoline.  In the middle of the table stood a gizmo, a thingummy.  It looked like a scale model of the Starship Enterprise.  It had wires protruding from its base.  Someone took the tin lid off the top of it and, suddenly, flashed onto a 100-inch screen on the wall, I could see myself filling the whole of it. ‘Turn that thing off,’ I said to the eager beaver who was so keen to get on. No such joy.  I had the mortification of staring at a familiar sexagenarian’s phizog looming up on the screen, warts and all.  I looked like Bella Lugosi with a skin complaint.  My gnarled, knotted hands looked as if I had spent two years hauling the keel, or keeling the haul, on a three-masted barque in the Arctic Circle. Lastly, and worst of all, I seemed to have adopted a permanent maniacal scowl – a cross between John McEnroe and Mr Hyde.
I had to wait my turn to speak.  Somebody from London was on first.  She spoke mainly in adverbs – made up of ‘basically’, ‘actually’ and ‘obviously.’  She was young, and the video link was more favourable to her than me but, even so, she looked like Joan Sims on the set of ‘Carry on Sergeant.’  I let my gaze drift around the room.  The young people were hanging on to her every adverb, their mouths agape, their eyes shining with sheer joy.  You would have thought they were watching one of the Reverend Billy Graham’s more sprightly sermons than clocking a monosyllabic mockney with a perm like something dreamed up by Tracey Emin.  
I shifted my gaze to the opposite window, where I could see a reflection of the endless traffic scudding along the M8 and arching over the Clyde as if on a conveyor-belt.  My mind started to wander and I thought of all the meetings I had been in, all the people I had met, all the places I had seen, and here I was, reduced to a bit-part player in a fin-de-siecle end-of-the-pier show for the terminally bewildered. 
When it was eventually my turn to say something, the Starship Enterprise ensured that the London connection gained a clear view of my head and shoulders.  I had no idea my brow was so massive, like Lurch’s from the Addams Family, and such a nose – Cyrano de Bergerac had nothing on me.   
I said my piece quickly, and grumpily, in a voice that was a cross between Lee Marvin and Ben, of Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men fame.  I stood waiting for questions.  The bright shiny faces had dropped like sheep’s fleece after shearing and instead of shining, their eyes were as dull as a stamp-collector’s diary.  I sat down, vaguely annoyed.  There had been a time when I could have lit up a room with my witty repartee, but that time has long gone and now I have the effect on an audience of a middle-aged academic teaching sociology to a group of rhesus monkeys.
Outside, the rain spat down and ran off the gutters in little rivulets.  Not for the first time recently, I wondered how far you have to fall before you start to rise again.