Do you find that when you are telling an anecdote to someone, you suddenly get the uneasy feeling you have told the same person the very same story before? Maybe several times?
It is one of the perils of getting older. You embark on an amusing reminiscence, lose confidence, falter – and then decide to plough on to the punchline. The trouble is, people are too polite to stop you in your tracks, even when you have begged them to say if they’ve heard it before.
The wonderful news is that I have developed an app that solves this problem. It is called Borenomore.
Its database holds hundreds of your best anecdotes. By means of sophisticated voice-recognition technology, each anecdote can be identified by a trigger word or phrase, such as my dear old granny or donkey’s years ago or my headmaster or complete fiasco – and of course a great mate, my first car, a prank, the war and rather a funny thing actually.
In a matter of seconds, the app can identify the anecdote that’s in the offing, run through all the contacts on your phone and highlight the names of those persons who were present when the anecdote was previously deployed.
An alert is then sounded. You can choose your default alert from a selection that includes a beep, a discreet cough or an audible yawn.
Sometimes, when you are halfway through some reminiscence, you realise I have developed an app that solves this problem. It is called Borenomore you have forgotten the point of it, the punchline, or the names of crucial characters in it.
No problem. Just touch the ‘abort anecdote’ button on the app and your phone will actually ring itself, so that it appears that you have been interrupted by a call.
You can also alter the settings on your app to suit the surroundings where your reminiscence is likely to occur. The default settings include ‘bar’ and ‘family occasion’ and ‘wedding speech’, ‘coffee morning’ and ‘reunion’. You can, of course, customise the app to suit other surroundings.
The deluxe version of Borenomore
has an additional function. If, in the course of a story you are telling, you happen to mention, for example, what you paid for a house or a meal in, say, 1957, this handy little device will immediately calculate the equivalent of that sum in today’s money.
The app is not quite ready to be downloaded yet. There are one or two snags that need fixing. I’ve been developing it with an old mate who was a contemporary of mine at school.
Actually, there’s a rather funny story about him...
Oliver Pritchett worked for the Sunday Telegraph for over 40 years
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