BY ROGER WATSON

I am sure that I am not alone. My life is dominated by series of electronic devices which include a MacBook, an iPad, an iPhone (providers other than Apple are available) and a Kindle (Country Squire passim). It is not so much the fact that my whole life is on these devices, having fallen totally for the convenience of the digital age, but the almost continual obsession that develops – a ‘lust for power’ if you will – with keeping them charged.

Thus, my banking is done via my iPhone, I pay for almost everything by Apple Pay (or WeChat when I am in China). My rail tickets, boarding passes and hotel vouchers are there as is my frequent flier card and my Senior Railcard. The sheer number of apps I have for navigating transport systems in Europe, the USA, Australia, the Far East and Southeast Asia is enormous, and I track my morning runs there too.

I only have one diary, and you can guess where that is. I communicate via email, SMS, WhatsApp and an array of other more secure platforms with family, friends and colleagues. I read books and magazines on Kindle and watch movies and TV series on iPad. When I travel, all my work is done on a MacBook.

And it is when I travel that I am most ‘lustful’. Whereas, when at home, I can easily and conveniently charge multiple devices in various room and in my office simultaneously, when on the move things are less convenient. Power sockets are less numerous and there is the thorny issue of the adaptors needed to plug the good old three pin plug into the various types of sockets: European, US and Australian. All different.

Options for charging devices become severely limited and the issue is compounded by the array of cables required once you have found a socket and established that you have the appropriate adaptor. As I write, all four of the devices I carry have different types of sockets to introduce power into the device.

Apple devices keep changing their sockets and, moreover, whereas a USB plug would ensure that you could at least plug any cable into your three pin plug charger, this is no longer the case. Apple, having first introduced their new C plug at both ends of the MacBook cable, now only have the C plug at the end connecting to the power socket; the delivery end at the device has an entirely new kind of magnetic plug and socket.

The long and the short of this situation of burgeoning plugs and sockets at either end of the charging cables means that, when on the road, I must carry a veritable spaghetti junction of cables in my backpack. These are not easily distinguishable as they are all white. Despite the order I try to impose on this motley collection of cables, I can often be seen in an airport lounge extracting a tangled web of deceit from my bag, spending a few minutes untangling it and then realising after winding up the rest neatly into loops before returning them to my bag that I have chosen the wrong one. Repeat and rewind (literally).

To mitigate some of the anxiety I suffer worrying where the next source of voltage will be found, I also carry a fifth device: a charge pack. I cannot carry the most super duper mega ones as I work in China and Chinese security obsess over power packs and limit the amount of charge they may contain (100WH-160WH). Any larger and they get tossed unceremoniously into a box behind the security desk.

Of course, the mitigation is only temporary because, as soon as I start using my charger, I begin fretting about how long it will remain charged and, when it runs out of charge, where will I charge it and do I have the right cable. Imagine my distress recently in Hong Kong when, on the way to meet a friend. My iPhone was rapidly expiring so I smugly pocketed my charger and a cable before leaving the hotel only to find on the train that I had taken the wrong cable.

The moral of this tale, if there is one, is that technology, hailed as labour saving and potentially adding to our leisure time, has simply filled that time with more to worry about. While on the move, one thing that brings relief is to insert my Bluetooth earphones, close my eyes and listen to some music while in the air, in a lounge or on a train. But only if I have remembered to charge them.

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Roger Watson is a Registered Nurse and Editor-in-Chief of Nurse Education in Practice.