AirTag

Going commando

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I love that if the phrase “going commando” means anything to you, it’s because of Friends. One joke in one episode of one sitcom has had major repercussions. (And if you just saluted military man Major Repercussions, we can thank the writers of How I Met Your Mother.)

But that’s not why we’re here. I want to boast at you about my fantastic writing – and then puncture that with the truth. I learned a lesson this week and I think it is so key that I would have vowed to you that I learned it two decades ago plus I’ve practiced it daily since then.

Yet apparently not.

The lesson is that writing can be extraordinarily concise, that you can do a huge amount in an instant. And that since you can, you must. You’re talking to a fella who wrote for BBC Ceefax, the news service that makes Twitter seem spacious, and I’m still learning to be more concise.

Actually, let me quickly throw in this, let me say “here endeth the lesson” because a) I’ve always wanted to write those words and 2) I want to tell you a Ceefax story that has just popped back into my head. (The a) and 2) line comes from Paul Reiser and other writers on Mad About You. This is also not what we’re here to talk about.)

Anyway. On one of my earliest days on the Ceefax Entertainment desk, I was assigned to write the Blue Peter pages. I can’t remember the details now, but it was something about how every episode the children’s series then featured various things you could make and Ceefax ran around a dozen pages detailing it.

Being new and not knowing any better, I wrote it all in two pages.

I can see my editor standing over my shoulder with the printed out email from the Blue Peter office, pointing at some detail and saying “But what about this – oh, that is in there.” It all was. Given that I am now starting to drag this story out, I maintain that I am Mr Concise.

Except I do a weekly YouTube series called 58keys and I script it. I’m a scriptwriter, it’s what I do. And this week’s edition had a lovely title that I planned –– “Looking for AirTags in All the Wrong Places” — plus a lesson I didn’t.

AirTags are this new teeny tracker you put on your keyring or in your car or on your luggage. If you lose the keyring, the car or the luggage, your iPhone will tell you precisely where they are. Under the right conditions, precisely means really scarily precisely.

So I know this is an obvious gag, but I scripted an opening where I “lost” an AirTag and then had to go searching for it. Here’s what I scripted for the opening 50 seconds or so, including titles.

INT. OFFICE – DAY
ME: Right, two things to say. First, hello, I’m William Gallagher and this is 58keys which is for writers like you and me who use Macs, iPhones and iPads. Do subscribe. Second, AirTags. Just buy one.

HOLD UP EMPTY AIR

ME: “Get an AirTag and you will never again lose – well, anything.” [“REALISE” YOU DON’T HAVE AN AIRTAG.] Oh.

EXT. GARDEN – DAY

Crawl commando-style over the grass, using your iPhone to find the AirTag on your key ring.

– SHOT ONE: your keys in the grass. Then iPhone with “Here” and you picking them up
– SHOT TWO: commando-style close up of you hunting
– SHOT THREE: overhead view of you picking them up

That’s pretty concise. But the way I set it up, the first thing I filmed out in my garden was Shot Two. I filmed that, then I was on my back, squinting in the sunlight as I checked what I’d got –– and I knew.

I knew that I didn’t need Shot One. Or Shot Three. The whole story, the whole gag, was there in Shot Two and in fact in exactly five seconds from the middle of it. So I didn’t bother to film those other two shots.

You can watch it, you can see for yourself.

I hope you think it’s funny, I expect you’ll think I look like an eejit, but I know with total certainty that you will agree it does the job I set out to do. The script has one scene with three shots and a total of 278 words of description.

But I showed it all, conveyed it all in five seconds.

Another lesson I learned, incidentally, is that it’s surprisingly hard to do that commando-style crawl across your garden. I don’t see that lesson sticking with me as much as the concise writing one, mind.

AirTag

Playing tag

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This is just tickling me today. It’s early Friday morning and before you and I even start to talk, I have already looked up the tracking information for a parcel that’s due this afternoon. I’m getting a delivery of AirTags for a work thing, I’ll be writing non-fiction about them as soon as they’re here. These AirTags come out today and they mean I’ll never again lose my keys or my car. And one day when we can all travel again, they mean I can stand in JFK and know precisely which room my luggage is in back at Heathrow.

But for now, for today, this means that I am currently tracking the delivery of tracking devices.

I know our lives are riddled with technology and that having an AirTag on my keyring is yet another example of that. Given years of development and doubtlessly millions of dollars of investment, it feels like a pretty big hammer to solve the nut of my wondering where my keys are once a year. It’s like how I once saw a video about how tin foil is made and, I tell you, my sandwiches are not worth that effort.

Maybe this is just me, but it feels as if we always think of technology as this huge force that impinges on us. Hopefully for good, doubtlessly sometimes for bad, but it’s this thing that presses into us. I believe, though, that rather than some impersonal single force, technology is incredibly, just incredibly illustrative of the specific people who make it.

So for instance I was once hired to work for a day in a client’s office but the PC they put me on decided to update Windows. Three hours I sat there, being paid I suppose but acutely embarrassed that I wasn’t getting the work done and increasingly conscious that the deadline was becoming painful. But screw me and my work, Windows wanted updating so Windows is gonna update. At long, long length.

That does tell me something about myself and my capacity for foul language, but it also vividly conveys to me what it is like to be someone who works at Microsoft. Everyone is different, obviously, but seemingly no one at Microsoft gives enough of a stuff about what its customers need to do. To me, then the entire, massive Microsoft corporation has a personality and I don’t like it.

I know people who loathe Apple, too, but to me the difference is that people there take a minute longer to think. I realise I’m comparing two faceless corporations who in reality surely don’t care about me. But when a Mac needs to be updated, it asks you first. Can it do that now or are you busy? One question, one thought, a world of difference in the personality.

Then if you follow Facebook, I mean as a company, it’s been hard lately to not see that gigantic organisation as a petty teenager. I’ve got so into this that this week’s 58keys, my YouTube series about technology for writers, threw out all the technology and instead took a writer’s view of examining Facebook’s tantrums.

I think that technology also shines a little light on actual individuals, actual human beings, too. Take these AirTags, for instance. When they were announced, I know plenty of people whose first and maybe only thought was hmm, must be Bluetooth LE, probably a U1 processor, got to be leveraging the network of iPhones in the world.

And my first thought was how they could be used to track people.

They can’t really, by the way. I’m embarrassed quite how much I’ve thought this through, reasonably worrying about domestic abuse victims but also excitedly thinking up thriller plots. But I’m impressed by quite how much Apple has thought it through before me. I can just about see a way to do it, to plant an AirTag on someone and follow them, but it is ludicrously complicated, depends on so many coincidences in a row, and I cannot see a way to prevent you being caught pretty soon.

An AirTag is a tiny thing, about the size of a coin, and yet it’s also therefore this huge illustration of a marriage of technology and people. I’m certain it isn’t easy to think up the technology, but we’ve seen a lot of examples where seemingly it was easy to stop thinking once the tech was done, to not think further into how it will be used.

I am biased here because technology is how I get to talk to you. But for my entire writing career, I’ve had one foot in technology and one foot in drama. I used to think that it was just because my handwriting is so bad that I have to use keyboards, but now I’m wondering if really the two sides are not different at all.

Plus if I don’t spend today tracking my tracking devices, I’ll spend it metaphorically eating chocolate. So there’s that.