Techno twit

My laptop hit a glitch last week and stopped working and I have spent the past week wearing my IT manager hat. This is not good news. My nearest Apple Store is an hour’s drive away, and I have spent the best part of this week hacking up and down the motorway so I can sit at their Genius Bar and pretend to understand what they’re talking about. Perhaps, if I were younger, it would all make more sense. Maybe, if I were cleverer, I wouldn’t come away feeling so hideously inadequate.

I was the only person in the store writing things down on a piece of paper using a dinosaur pencil. The air of pity was palpable. Two hours later, back up the motorway, into my ancient crumbling mouse-infested house, I follow the pencil instructions and update all my equipment onto the latest operating system. And hey presto! my entire calendar has disappeared.

I stopped using a paper diary this year for the first time since forever. My daughters assured me that nobody uses an old-fashioned paper diary any more, and that that was the whole point of modern technology. My phone will speak to my laptop. My laptop will push all critical information to my iPad. And my desktop machine will happily chat to the microwave. I don’t understand any of it, so my daughters and various young friends set it all up and explained it all to me several times over. Then then glitch happened and now I’m royally stuffed. Quite how I’m going to resolve it I don’t know, but I can’t face another visit to the genius bar. I have a feeling I’m the kind of customer who gives Apple a bad name. A customer who takes the phrase idiot-proof to a new dimension.

I’m going to have to wing it on the diary front and hope to God that nothing catches fire. I’m sure there are some deadlines in there, and I know I’m supposed to be at a festival in August. Then there was that thing in September that I have no recollection of. The dentist appointment can remain lost in the ether.

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