Saturday 12 January 2019

Confessions of certain inadequacies on my part!

Well, today I seem to be determinedly being a GIRL! A totally ditsy female who can’t do things!

Only women, by the way, are allowed to describe themselves in this fashion. If men do it they are being sexist!

Be that as it may, I am definitely not managing to do certain things. As a rule I am quite self-sufficient. In general I can fix things. I can build flatpack furniture without any problem whatsoever. I am an ace decorator, doing bits of plastering as needed and repainting walls and so on. I can usually find solutions. But the last few days have stumped me.

First there has been the business of the new phone.

Phil and I don’t “do” new iPhones and contracts with Apple. As our daughter and her older offspring upgrade their iPhones, we sort of inherit their more outdated handsets and put in sims from another provider. It works fine. Except that the process of transferring stuff from the old phone to the less old phone might have been witchcraft as far as I was concerned. I let my daughter get on with it on my behalf. At the moment it works reasonably well except that my Fitbit still talks to the old phone instead of the less old phone. And the Messenger app does not work on the new/less old device. No doubt it will all be sorted as it goes along.

Despite being quite good with machinery - I once wowed my engineer brother-in-law by taking my sewing machine apart, fixing it and putting it back together - I confess that I have always found information technology more than a little daunting. (Come to that, moving from a three-speed to a ten-speed gear system on my bike was quite a challenge - but I overcame it!) Long ago I briefly resisted the move from type writer to word processor. That is all in the past, however, as I quickly realised that the word processor had considerable advantages. I am not a total luddite or technophobe!

But whenever we had IT training in the various colleges I worked at, I was the one who was always lagging behind the rest in the group. When everyone else at stage 15, I was still floundering about at stage 4! And I have to admit that I got really grumpy over the whole procedure, something which is not conducive to learning new skills!

My attitude quickly became one of “I can do certain things but others are just too technical for me and I am not really interested in finding out how to do them anyway”. I do what I do and I do it well!

I cope fine with online banking and probably could not live without it. I am happy to buy stuff online. I cheerfully buy tickets for concerts over the internet. If pushed I can sort out travel that way too, but as Phil does it so much more quickly and efficiently I usually let him get on with it. I have not bothered to master streaming but I like to own CDs. And besides, it seems to me that if an artist has selected an order of songs to make an album, it’s a but churlish to simply download two or three of the songs!

This is probably why I failed science back in secondary school.

Then today I went to the supermarket, came back with a couple of bags of food shopping, switched on the light in the living room and the bulb went pop. Now, that is a bit of stuff I CAN deal with. Except that I realised that as the living room light went pop, the light in the hall went out too. And none of the lights would work.

Power-cut, I thought! How annoying!

Except that the standard lamps were still working. And all the electrical gadgets that plug in were still working.

So, not a power-cut then.

A simple power-cut might have been easier as I would just have to rely on an outside agency to put it right. On the other hand there would be the matter of the freezer quietly defrosting itself. So I presume this is a blown fuse issue or something like that - just the sort of thing I never deal with. And the man who does deal with such things won’t be back until later.

How very annoying! And it would choose to happen on a really dull day!

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