Beyond Selidor

I was talking to my mother and sister via FaceTime this morning and Mum was telling me all about her radio programme this week (she's a radio broadcaster who does a programme which takes events that are making headlines and does a deep dive into the history behind them, interviewing historians, economists, commentators, activists, archivists etc). The progamme this week is all about studies into using psychodelic drugs to treat mental health conditions. After a while, Mum fell to reminiscing about the '70s, and my sister and I were sitting there in amusement at a number of anecdotes that began 'and that time [ex-boyfriend] and I were taking magic mushrooms/acid/etc'.

I had the dual realisation that a) my parents had a way more adventurous youth than I did (I'd known about most of this stuff already, but it's not exactly something I think about actively) and b) if I wanted to obtain illicit drugs in the UK, I would have no idea who to ask, whereas I know at least twenty people in Canberra and Sydney I could ask, should I want to do so. My social circles in Australia are as equally filled with high achieving nerds as they are in the UK, so I'm not really sure how to explain the discrepancy. I should make it clear that I have zero desire to acquire illicit drugs, I just found the contrast amusing.

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On a completely different note, the complicated Australian bureaucracy thing I was dealing with last week led me to another bizarre realisation. I remember when I met lowercasename for the first time, he told me that his parents (who emigrated from Russia to Australia in the 1980s and spoke only Russian to each other, and him, at home) had left Russia before various technological things were invented, and as a result of being isolated from other Russian-speakers had no idea of the Russian names of such things. Therefore, his family basically invented their own Russian words for various pieces of software and commonplace computer hardware, and no other Russian speakers use the same terminology.

My situation is slightly different. I lived in Australia long enough that I had a tax file number, did paid work and filed tax returns, and had to contribute towards the rent and bills of a shared house — but I did all this at a time when everything was entirely analog, and on paper. My wages were paid directly into my bank account, but I never had internet banking, I filed my tax returns on paper and got my tax refunds as cheques which I had to deposit physically in the bank, and when I needed to transfer rent money to my housemate I withdrew cash from my bank account and filled in a paper deposit slip and deposited the money in person at a branch of her bank. I existed entirely on paper.

And of course, since I've lived and worked in the UK during the years when such things were increasingly done online, I know how to navigate all this stuff in a UK context, I know the UK terminology, and I am as close as it's possible to be to a 'digital native' ... in the UK, and its various pieces of bureaucracy. But in Australia, I have no idea! I don't even know the names for government web platforms, or technical terminology (someone over the phone was like 'you can pay it via BPay,' and I was like 'what's BPay?').

It's as if I'm a time-traveller from an age of paper. It's not an insurmountable problem (I can eventually figure out most of this stuff via context or Google), but it is an oddly disorienting feeling.