Technology! Wonderful thing, technology. When it works. And
when the power is on.
Oh yes, I remember it well, in the old days, when I worked
in the libraries – when we still had dumb terminals, and multiplexers, and a
myriad of things that could go wrong.
The phone calls – ‘My screen doesn’t work!’.
‘Is the plug plugged in at the wall?’
‘I don’t know! Oh, yes it is… but the screen still doesn’t
work.’
‘Is the plug switched on?’
‘Yes…no…there, you fixed it!’
‘My corpus is frozen!’ Lucky corpus, it’s as hot as hell
here…
‘So’ – attempt at humour – ‘it’s a case of non habeas corpus?’
‘Huh?’
Corpus delicti…
I swore I would never, ever have one of those damned
machines in my home.
Then I retired (and that’s another story)
And I got one. A nice big, clunky desktop (laptops were
still viewed with a degree of suspicion in those days, how would all the
necessary fit into such a small space,
it must be a scam…)
A nice whirring tower, a monitor with a back like a camel,
and a keyboard that took up acres of desk. I surrounded it with crystals and
other propitiatory offerings, and embraked on my internet life.
Of course it was only supposed to be for email, so I could
keep in touch with my sons. Well, that was a loser from the start – neither of
my sons are writers. They may phone from time to time, but sending fun-filled
and informative emails is just not going to happen, ever.
So I was forced, yes forced, to explore other avenues of
computorial satisfaction, and made the acquaintance of google. Google is a
dangerous instrument for a librarian. Worse than a dictionary. You start off
with innocently looking up one thing, and three hours later, you end up miles
and worlds away from the original query, which is by then forgotten anyway, so
at some later stage you have to look it up again.
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