Postcards From Across the Pond

For most of my working life, I was an IT professional. Ten years of retirement, however, have left me unprepared for dealing with today’s electronics.

If you care to refer to the previous post, you will see that, after several false starts, we finally sorted out our telly troubles. However, a week after the final fix was made, the telly simply stopped working.

Still convinced it was an antenna issue, I visited a local antenna expert and related our tale of woe.

“If that happened so soon after the fix those other guys did, I’d call them,” the man in the shop reasonably suggested.

I told him I would if my wife had not reported feeling “uncomfortable” with them in the house, especially as she was alone. The man asked who they were, and when I told him he said, “Oh, yeah, that makes sense.”

Apparently, these cowboys have a reputation, and I was not eager to have any further dealing with them. So, the new antenna guy came to our flat, when we were both home.

He was able to demonstrate, unequivocally, that it was not an antenna problem, but an issue with the brand-new television.

“But it’s a brand-new television,” I said.

He shrugged. “That doesn’t mean anything these days.”

I couldn’t argue with that, so we made a visit to John Lewis, where we had bought the set.

(For those of you in the US, shopping at John Lewis signifies that you are very POSH indeed. I just wanted you to know that.)

And John Lewis, not wanting their profit share to fall any further, sent a guy over straight away.

He was competent, polite and thorough, but halfway through—and without any prompting—began spouting his political leanings. So now I’m sitting in my living room dependant on a dangerously stupid individual to fix my TV. I didn’t invite him in to debate political theory, he’s there to fix my telly. You don’t go into strangers’ houses to provide a service and start talking politics. That’s fucking stupid.

Seriously, it’s hard to find good tradesmen these days.

He did, however, get the telly working, and had I thought to look at the telly for what it actually is rather than what it says it is, I might have figured it out myself. It’s not really a television, it’s a computer whose main function is to show videos, and when a computer goes south, you reboot it, and if that doesn’t work, you reset it to factory settings. And that worked.

However, having used that fix a number of times on laptops, I do know that, once done, the work is just beginning. You then have to spend an inordinate amount of time re-installing everything you have previously installed. On a laptop, this can take days; on the telly, just an hour or two.

But still.

At least, and for the time being (I’m not totally optimistic), the telly works. And then, my mouse died.

That happened yesterday and, for an entire afternoon, I resolved to be satisfied with the laptop’s touchpad, an exercise that prompted me to go out this morning and hunt up a new mouse, which was when I ran into yet more uncomfortable realities.

First, like printers and laptops, many people no longer have a need for a mouse. They have touchscreens on their tablets and phones and iPads. What’s a mouse?

What, indeed, because the second issue is that designers seem to have forgotten what a mouse is for and how it should be shaped. What I eventually found was a hunk of plastic with multiple buttons—some of which I cannot find a use for—in a shape that no one who uses a mouse would ever consider.

“Comfortable ‘Handshake’ position,” the box said. This sounded dubious but, as it was the only design there, I took it. And it is dubious. I do not dispute that my hand now rests in ‘Handshake’ position, but that is far from comfortable for hours on end, unlike the ‘sorta lying flat on the desktop’ position I am used to. And what was wrong with that? Why change it when it’s been working since Day One? It’s like going to buy a new car only to find the doors are now situated in the roof “for my convenience.”

The other convenient not-convenient thing about my spiffy new mouse was, when I plugged it in, it immediately began working. Until, that is, I ran the installation software that started up immediately after. Then the mouse stopped working, the software refused to recognize it, and nothing I did seemed to help. So, I rebooted, plugged the mouse in, ignored the redundant set-up application, and everything works fine.

But, since we’re dealing with electronics, I know this will not last long.