I was shaving one Saturday morning with BBC Radio 5 Live’s Danny Baker Show playing in the background. It is a reflection of Mr Baker’s infectious hilarity that he attracts radio’s funniest callers.

一个周六的早晨，我在刮胡子的时候听着英国广播公司(BBC)第五台(Radio 5 Live)的《丹尼•贝克秀》(Danny Baker Show)节目。贝克节目中打来电话的人是广播节目中最逗的，这反映出贝克的笑料极富感染力。

The programme’s theme was something like: “Mistakes that can never be corrected.” A guy phoned in to tell how, in the days of VHS, he accidentally recorded Match of the Day over a tape of his daughter’s wedding.

这次节目的主题是类似于“无法纠正的错误”这样的话题。有人打进电话来，提到在录像机流行的时代，他一不小心在录《英超当日集锦》(Match of the Day)时擦掉了女儿婚礼的录像。

I was only half listening but thought: “That’s not a problem. All he has to do is press ‘control’ and ‘Z’.”

我漫不经心地听着，心里想：“那算什么问题。他只要同时按Ctrl键和Z键就可以了。”

Control Z is my secret sauce. I am amazed how few people know it. It works on any PC keyboard in Microsoft Word and other programs, and reverses mistakes. Clumsily deleted a paragraph? Control Z and it magically reappears.

Ctrl-Z是我的秘密武器。我惊叹于知道它的人如此之少。在微软(Microsoft)的Word和其他许多程序里，这个组合都管用，它可以逆转你的差错。保存文件之前错手删了一段话？按一下Ctrl-Z，这段话就会魔术般地重现了。

I have reincarnated pages of writing that way — you can carry on control Z-ing, reversing action after action, if the mistake you made was a few minutes ago.

通过这种办法，我曾让很多页文字重获新生。你甚至可以多次输入Ctrl-Z，一步一步地撤销操作——如果你的错误是在几分钟前犯下的话。

In a previous column I touched on technology habits that seem to have subtly altered our internal programming. I mentioned the occasional desire to turn down loud people in restaurants with an imaginary remote, or touch a nonexistent hyperlink in a printed magazine in the hope that it will, as on an iPad, take me to a different page.

在以往的一篇专栏文章里，我曾提及这类技术习惯似乎已微妙改变了我们的内在“程序”。我提到，我偶尔曾想通过想象中的遥控器，调低餐馆里大嗓门人士的音量，还曾想点击印刷版杂志上不存在的超链接，期待它会像在iPad上那样，把我带到不同的页面。

Since articulating this, I have been making notes on my own and others’ crossover technology habits that have leaked into the wrong sphere of activity.

自打明确提到这事以来，我一直在留意自己和他人误入错误场合的跨界技术习惯。

These quirks stem from being of the generation that has moved from analogue rather than having been born digital. If I were cleverer, I would think up one of those annoying, modish words such as “trope” or “meme” to describe my micro-phenomenon.

这些习惯源自我们是从模拟时代转为数字时代的一代人，而不是生来就置身于数字时代的一代人。如果我更聪明一些，我或许会想出一个类似“修辞”(trope)或“文化基因”(meme)之类、恼人而又时髦的词汇，来描述这类微观现象。

Here is my list:

下面是我列出的清单：

• You still make notes by hand in meetings. After a couple of pages of scribbling, you become uneasy about not having saved your work to make sure the writing, um, stays on the page.

• 还在会议中手动记笔记的你，在涂鸦了几页之后，开始担心没有保存自己的劳动，想要确保自己的笔记留在页面上。

• Faced with a multi-page printed document, you are impatient to get to the bit that concerns you. You instinctively dive to the search box. Where is that darned search box?

• 面对一份多页打印文档，你不耐烦地要去看与自己相关的部分。你本能地去找搜索框。这该死的搜索框在哪呢？

• The same lengthy document. You try to scroll down . . . before realising you cannot scroll down stapled sheets of paper.

• 同样一份冗长的文档。你试图向下滚动……结果发现没法滚动用订书机订成一本的多页纸张。

• You’re driving a car without satnav. Maybe it’s rented, maybe you forgot to bring your TomTom, or maybe you didn’t bother because you know the way. You get a frisson of irritation with the silence. “Why are you not saying anything?” The fact that cars can’t talk has momentarily escaped you.

• 你在没有卫星导航的情况下开车。这也许是由于车是租的，也许你忘了带你的TomTom，亦或是你由于熟悉路线而不想费事带GPS。车中的沉默气得你一激灵。“怎么不说句话？”在那一瞬间，你忘了汽车无法说话的事实。

• There’s a photo in a book or newspaper and you want to zoom in to see a part of it. Your hand moves towards the page to do that thumb and forefinger expanding action before you realise it’s not a tablet.

• 书上或报纸上有张照片，你想使用放大功能看清照片的局部。你把手划过纸面，拇指和食指做出放大动作，才意识到这不是平板电脑。

• You’ve lost your wallet somewhere in the house. Hold on, you think, I’ll call it and hear where the ring is coming from. Oops, no you won’t. It’s not a phone.

• 你的钱包落在屋中某处了。等一下，你想道，我会呼它一下，听听声音从哪里来。但是，你不会这么做的。钱包可不是手机。

• A more extreme case of wallet loss. You’re so distracted that you think for a fraction of a second of googling to find where you left it. Or hitting Control F to find it.

• 还有一个有关钱包丢失的更极端例子。有那么一眨眼的功夫，心烦意乱的你想用谷歌(Google)找出自己把钱包丢哪了，或者试图按下Ctrl-F找到它。

• Spectacle wearers only. You’re stumbling around in the morning looking for your glasses. You put them on. Aha, you think. Now we are in HD.

• 这个感觉只有戴眼镜的人才会有。你在清晨跌跌撞撞地找眼镜。最后你把眼镜戴上。啊哈！你心里想，现在我们有高清屏了。

Technology has a habit of moving on. The “pinch-to-zoom” tablet gesture, for example (more accurately unpinch to zoom), did not exist before the iPad came out in 2010.

技术有不断演变的习惯。比如，在2010年iPad诞生之前，“掐手指放大”（更准确地说是分手指放大）的平板电脑手势还不存在。

Already our brains have internalised it, and there is a generation growing up who have never not known it. A YouTube video of children who believe magazines are broken iPads has had nearly 5m views.

我们的大脑已经内化了这种动作，而从出生起就知道这种动作的一代人正在长大。有一个YouTube视频片段显示孩子们以为杂志是坏了的iPad，这段视频获得了近500万次点击。

I have discussed my crossover technology phenomenon with Adam Gazzaley, a professor of neurology, physiology and psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco.

我把这种技术习惯跨界的现象与亚当•加扎利(Adam Gazzaley)讨论了一下，他是加州大学旧金山分校(University of California, San Francisco)的神经学、生理学和精神病学教授。

Prof Gazzaley and Larry Rosen, professor emeritus of psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills, have a book coming out called The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World.

加扎利教授和加州州立大学多明戈斯山分校(California State University, Dominguez Hills)心理学名誉教授拉里•罗森(Larry Rosen)著有《分心的头脑：高科技世界中的古代头脑》(The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World)一书。

“This is fascinating,” he says. “Really interesting. I think it’s probably quite common and is probably related to phantom vibration, when you believe a mobile phone is ringing on silent. Yes, a visual and auditory version of the same blurring of the lines between what’s real and imagined.”

他说：“这个问题扣人心弦。真的很有意思。我认为这现象可能十分常见，也许和震动幻觉(phantom vibration)有关，这种幻觉是指人们相信手机正在振动状态下响铃。没错，同时在视觉和听觉上混淆了真实和想象现实的界线。”

So what will be the pinch-to-zoom gestures of the near future, the habits we will be trying to carry into everyday life — but with the wrong technology — in, say, 2036?

那么，在不远的将来（比如在2036年），哪些习惯会是新的“掐手指放大”手势呢，也就是我们会错误地试图用到日常生活中的技术习惯？

If I may stick my neck out, I will propose a few.

如果我可以冒昧设想一下，我会提出以下几条：

• You hear someone speaking in a foreign language and become irritated that you cannot understand them because you don’t have your translating earbuds in. The idea that your native ears (legacy ears, for techies) cannot translate languages will, for a second or two, be really annoying.

• 你听到某人在讲外语，因为听不懂而心烦意乱，原因是你没有戴上翻译耳塞。有那么一两秒钟，那种你天生的耳朵（技术控称为“遗留耳朵”）无法翻译外语的想法让你相当烦恼。

• You forget to wear your connected glasses or put in your internet contacts (the descendants of today’s joked-about Google Glass internet spectacles) and experience a flash of fury at, say, a conference, when your unaided eyes do not recognise colleagues’ faces and fail to discreetly brief you on who they are.

• 你忘了戴联网眼镜（这是如今被人当笑话的谷歌眼镜(Google Glass)的后代产品）或者忘了把互联网通讯录装入眼镜。这让你在一个大会上突然产生一股无名之火，因为没有辅助的双眼认不出同事的面孔，更没法悄悄提醒你他们是谁。

• You are so accustomed to using your hands to make air gestures, to control the TV and other devices, that you carry it over into everyday life. At least once a year, when listening to someone droning on at a meeting, you absentmindedly make the air gesture for fast forward. They will continue being boring. Unless they see the gesture, perhaps. Which may be a different kind of crossover error.

• 对于用手在空中做手势控制电视机和其他设备，你已经如此习惯，以至于你会将手势带入日常生活。每年至少有那么一次，当听到某人在会议上说着单调的内容时，你下意识地做出快进的手势。他们却会继续说着无聊的话，或许除非他们看到你的手势——然而这又是另一种不同类型的跨界技术习惯。

Let me think about that for a decade or two.

对于这个问题，让我再考虑一二十年吧。