Slow Slow Slow

My computer can probably calculate more sums in five seconds than I could in a lifetime. My sat-nav sifts through a million roads in a few seconds to plan my route. Even a digital watch can out-think me a hundred times over. We're surrounded by amazing technology of lightning speed, quite literally. So why does everything seem so slow?

My phone takes over a minute to 'restart', and my PC about the same. I have something like 4GB on my internet pipe, but pages sometimes still take 10 seconds to download. After pressing 'play', my DVD player thinks for about 20 seconds about whether it can be bothered to do anything about it. The cashpoint takes a fraction of a second to register each digit of my pin number, to the point that if I put it in too quickly it fails to recognise it.

So what's happening? Incredibly, it feels as though we are out-thinking these machines that are supposed to be the key to getting everything done faster, but instead seem to hold us up at every step of the way.