Saturday 31 March 2018

Things wear out

I'm not thinking of myself at this moment, but with advancing old age I notice that parts of me are the worse for wear, e.g. my left knee (twisted it years ago and have never really got it back to normal), my right shoulder (too many Match 3 computer games and I hate doing them with my left hand though I am actually left-handed), my hands (arthritis) and I must confess: my patience, which was never much to write home about e.g. I got a comment on a junior school end of term report that said that "she does not suffer fools gladly". I suppose that's still true today and often with regard to equipment that comes and goes regularly in my household.The criticism contradicts all the foolish things I have done in my life, but why live in the past? you can't change it.

I have not kept a tally of been-and-gone equipment. My most recent replacement was my fridge-freezer, The door of the freezer would not stay closed. I'd get up in the morning to find the food still frozen, but the freezer full of snow. I don't think I should talk about the 5 dead printers in my cellar (I used to do heavy-duty music printing for my choruses) or a few computers that outdated themselves or in one case overheated and switched themselves off after 40 minutes- often with catostrophic results - a repair woiuld not be accompanied by a guarantee because that (all in one) type of computer always overheated. No one had told me that when I bought it!. I now also have 3 laptops; one is very old and probably does not work at all; one is fairly new but terribly slow and needs a lot of updating all the time to keep it going at all, and the one I am writing on now, whose main feature is that it is compact.
And that's where my tustle with keyboards comes in. I don't like writing for long stretches on the laptop/notebook keyboard because I have constant skurmishes with the pad and have to sit too near the screen for comfort. So I attach an external keyboard, and they break down too, I discovered. Currently I have a nice white one that is losing its keys and has been discarded, a black one that does not do multi-media and the one I am using now, which has multi-media but keys you can't read! Oh dear. My touch-typing leaves a lot to be desired. I cope better with numbers and peripheries than with the letters and found I was thumping in my missprints at an even higher rate than usual. What now? I can't buy another keyboard one week later, can I?
A stoke of luck rescued me. I came across a packet of small capitals on sticky paper, so the keyboard now functions with sticky letters. What bliss to find the 'D' every time. There are 3 layers of sticky letters and lots of duplicates, such as the E, which I find every time anyway - E being the most used letter in the English alphabet - the letters must have been imported since there are no umlauts, but since I write mostly in English (on a German keyboard), that is not a problem. I'd put the English version on permanently if I could do without the umlauts that have to be written open on an English keyboard).
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You can see from this account that life is fraught with difficulties.
I'll make some toast now - on my brand new toaster, the old one having decided to burn anything put into it whatever the setting!
I have since moved from the vacuum cleanter to a brush, though do have a new one now, but it tends to fall apart at the slightest jerk. It's main feature is that because of its talent at falling apart it does fit into the space reserved for it.....

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