I suppose I should consider myself a beneficiary of the Myers Briggs test: according to its judgement I am the ‘Mastermind’. But I already knew that – I mean, hardly a day passes before I emit an Evil Laugh at the thought of my latest plan to conquer the universe. More to the point is … More How I failed my Myers Briggs test, and other adventures
One of the things I try and do daily is get out of the house around lunchtime for some exercise. As a writer it’s too easy to end up hunched over the computer for hours. A brisk lunchtime walk clears the mental cobwebs. A while back I came home to see a real estate agent’s … More The moral emptiness of real estate agents
My phone has an annoying habit of doing things by itself. Among other things, it’s made blank Facebook Messenger phone calls to random people on my Facebook friends lists. It frequently mutes itself, meaning I miss calls. And the other day it turned the screen brightness down to almost zero, rendering the phone virtually useless. … More When phones have a mind of their own
Back when I was at Napier’s Nelson Park School, a large-ish amount of time ago, I was always picked on by the teachers for writing with the wrong hand. The problem assumed crisis proportions in Standard 3, where kids had to write with fountain pens. Such pens were, of course, essential to a Proper Education … More A word about my handwriting, with apologies to Shakespeare
Of late one of my computers has been randomly blue-screening on startup. It started after Microsoft’s March update, disappeared in May, came back after the July update, and keeps on coming back. Sometimes it’s so apocalyptic a lockup that all I can do is crash the machine off at the wall and start from dead … More Blue-screens are the users fault, right?
It’s fair to say that 2020 has been the worst year in living memory. The world has, in the span of just a few months, been plunged into one of the most widespread and severe crises since the Second World War. Even the Cuba Crisis of 1962, with all its implication of nuclear armageddon, was … More How to understand 2020 – the worst year in living memory
One of the things that has puzzled a lot of people about the Covid-19 is why it affects some people very severely – even to death – and yet others can be completely asymptomatic and not even know they had it. This very wide range of possible severity has fuelled a good deal of ill-informed … More Why Covid-19 affects some and not others – maybe
Back when I was working in a corporate communications office the buzz-word was ‘outsourcing’. Anything other than ‘core business’ (which was never fully defined) could be dispensed with in favour of ‘service providers’. That didn’t mean the work went away, but this ‘rightsizing’ did mean that everybody’s job was suddenly under threat, as loyal and … More When outsourcing goes bad – a cautionary tale
How do you want to be remembered? It’s a pertinent question as our current civilisation apparently enters its end times and the focus turns to the way each of us responds to the growing collapse. But it’s also apt, I think, at any time. Historically, the way famous people are remembered flows from a mix … More How do you want to be remembered?
There was a story in the Guardian the other week about a real-life ‘Lord of the Flies’ adventure: six boys, hoping to escape life in Tonga, ended up cast away on a desert island for 18 months in 1966-67. They survived: and they did not become animals. On the contrary, they maintained the values and … More Can humans go feral?
Matthew Wright 
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