Pooters

My headteacher once publicly described me as 'old technology'. It was at the end of a young male teacher's class assembly and he had used power points, movie maker and every other whizzy bit of technology he could find and none of it crashed. I had played the piano, badly. I was a little offended. I know that because it was a quick comment made over three years ago and I haven't  let it go. The reason for my angst about the remark was that for a grumpy old woman I don't think I'm bad with technology - just unlucky.

I do struggle with idea of computers (or pooters, as most of the kids at school call them). It's hard to believe how much they can do, how much they can't do, how slow they can be and what they can know about you. I remember the excitement we felt in my final year of primary school when we were first introduced to Oswald, our very first class computer. Oswald was the shape of a large dinosaur egg and could tell you if you'd calculated simple one digit adding sums correctly. We would have never have thought that 35 years later we would be keeping a small computer in our pocket that not only made phone calls but acted as a dictionary, encyclopaedia, calculator, entertainer and Personal assistant. My phone tells me everything from when to change my contact lenses to when to worm the dog. Without it I wouldn't know how to live.

I'm not a technophobe. I have embraced social media and  can use everything Microsoft Office can throw at me but I am unlucky. If it was my assembly it would have crashed or frozen or had pink stripy lines running across the screen. I can do everything that you need to do to fix a problem but it won't work. Sometimes someone else will do exactly what I have done and it will be miraculously fixed or no one will be able to work out a solution, as happened when my Frozen Karaoke App suddenly started projecting on its side for no reason. 

Recently, our broadband has been intermittently rubbish. The Long Suffering Husband rang BT and complained. They asked us to do speed tests. Whenever I ran a test we got 0.3-2 mb and the LSH got anything up to 58mb. Whenever BT were on the phone we got 58mb without fail. Talking to people in India who are pretending to be sitting in an office just outside Cambridge always irritates me and the LSH won't let me talk to them just in case I say, "John? Really, that's a very strange accent for a John?" Or, "Sebastian? Thank you so much for your help, Shimoran." I agree with him, it does make me sound like a casual racist but it's the lies I can't take or the belief that the UK public are quite that stupid. It makes me suspect that nothing they tell me can be true. 

The most shocking thing about these conversations, though, was just how much information they have about you. They could tell us all the devices attached to our broadband and not just the type (eg mobile phone) but the make as well (Apple iphone5). The LSH became worried about our household insurance but I reminded him that India was probably too far away for a spot of targeted burglary.

The problem still hasn't been resolved. They don't think we have a problem and so they are quite happy. I need to write with all the dates and times of the tests on but I had logged the details on my laptop, which is three weeks out of warranty, which means the hard drive has failed and it has lost my whole life.  The man in the computer shop said, "That is unlucky."

Bloody Pooters!