I’ll have two of those...

... he says, eyeing the 23 inch monitors.

And he gets them. The shiny beasts crowd on his desks, the station like one out of the star-wars.

Soon enough, the old guys are there too, the laptop, the palmtop, the blackberry, all flickering in unison to their master tapping the somewhat understated dull keyboard.

I tell him, he looks like a kid on the seashore, filling up bucket after bucket with sand and water and claiming to be examining the ocean-floor this way.

He looks back puzzled, his eyes reflecting multiple-screens, the miniatures rectangle stars offended by my suggestion.

I leapfrog over the parallel and accuse, ‘don’t you feel responsible for feeding the market of cheap-glitter rather than asking for more complex solutions for multi-dimensional viewing?

You go into width rather than dept, playing into the hands of those that like easy sells.

Have you not seen a light-table before? ...’

The conversation is going nowhere, I yearn for portable viewers, small but not too small for aging eyes to strain, layered, responsive filters taking me into depths of digital oceans, him stuck with the star-wars theme, mesmerised by the comfort of the blanket of lit up-pixels.

Things were once going well.

Monitors were expensive, developers worked smart.

Those were the times of clever gadgets layering, splitting, sliding the screen.

Five years ago, I guess?