Archive
on parents
“I didn’t ask to be born!”. The perennial cry echoed across the supermarket car park as yet another child suffered some form of anguish. Of course they didn’t. Like all of us their arrival was the result of two other people’s actions and may, or may not, have been planned.
It was an issue that didn’t really occur to me until I was into old age. I suppose that, whilst I didd have my moments of angst along the way, the reason for my existence has been of no concern. I am, therefore I am, I have a life and I will do my best to live it. A simplistic philosophy perhaps, but it works for me.
I did not get to know my parents. I knew something of them, but discovered after they had gone that there was a lot more that I would have liked to have talked to them about once I had got to an age where I could have done so without embarrassment. Sadly my father was dead before I really got that far and my mother was so wrapped up in a tissue of lies and guilt that I didn’t really catch on to what her real story might have been.
I now have some facts about what happened, but nothing about why. I doesn’t matter that much because it is all history. Some of it shaped me into the man that I became, but I was living my life my way and that was more important to me. The future trumped the past.
I became a parent myself, but without any thought as to the responsibilities that the role of father demanded. There are three children than I am legally regarded as the father of, plus another three that I could be the father of. The last two children were the product of my first marriage and only the first of that pair was planned. The lady’s biological clock was ticking and she was, at that time, talking about us having three or four. The first pregnancy was not enjoyed and whilst their was a certain magic about becoming a proper dad I can’t say that I ever had any strong feelings.
I was 25 at that time. Yes I had entered into marriage on the understanding that we would try to have a family, but I do not think now that I had any idea as to what that meant. My relationships with my own mother and father were a model that I did not want to adopt with my own children, but I had no real concept of how to go about being a parent. All that you have to go on is instinct and experience. Back then there were not the number of books, and the internet was a twinkle in the eye.
In any case parenting is a concept that I think has much to blame for the state of society now. I loathe the word and all that it stands for. If people just tied to be good mums and dads things would be a lot better. How I did is for others to judge. My daughter, having fallen amongst benefit scroungers and become one herself has studied, qualified and now holds a position within the NHS doing something around pathology. She has two children herself and is married to a man that I cannot abide. We haven’t spoken in more than 20 years. My son has been in a relationship for a similar period and is in business with his step-son (who is around hisown age). I haven’t seen him for about three years now. They are both happy In their lives and relationships and I could not ask for more.
As I grew up through my teens I instinctively knew that I had to fly the family nest and make one of my own as soon as I could. It was nothing personal, just what I had to do, to stand on my own two feet. After a couple of false starts I made it, but it was one of those rare occasions that I took my father’s advice and I realised that I had married the wrong woman as a result. I tried to make it work, and the responsibility of two children weighed heavily, but in the end I had to go. The right woman came along and we are together still. We have no children jointly for I had been disconnected for abuse of privilege many years ago, but it is ironic that her daughter, who regards me as her real dad, is so like me in many ways that she could easily be the fruit of my loins.
I tried to give the children from my first marriage the independence that I had craved and, to some degree, had been denied. They have gone on to make their own lives and I am proud of them for that. That I don’t approve of some of their life choices is irrelevant; their lives are theirs to live, not mine. I have been happy to advise when they have asked, but I will not interfere. I love them, but will not smother them.
My assortment of children did not ask to be born any more than I did. Mine are here because I had sex with their mothers. It is as simple as that. We were all created by the same process. We did not ask to be here, but here we are. We have life, and what we do with it is our business. Make your choices and get on with it.
on decision making
to make a decision you need choices and information and therein lies a problem. We have available to us a vast resource of information that, for the majority, you only need to pull a slim device from your pocket and prod your finger at a few times to access. When I was young our family had an old Webster’s dictionary and a second hand atlas to refer to, but now you can find almost anything out in a matter of seconds.
Of course there is a lot out there that just isn’t true, but what is worse is that so often people just head for these dreadful echo chambers full of people who think the same way. What happened to critical thinking? This slavish belief in things that people have heard and refuse to submit to any sort of challenge or test is going to lead us as a society into all sorts of problems. Forget global warming, society is likely to collapse well before we all start to fry.
In recent years I have watched corporate decision making become dominated by the computer. Data can be modelled and the decision making process has moved more and more towards doing what the machine tells you to do. I have been a big fan of having the computer fed by doing the work rather than data being input manually and I have designed or coded a lot of such programmes. I have reaped their benefits too as an operator.
However, to just slavishly accept what the machine tells you to do puts decision making in jeopardy if you don’t understand where the data that it is using is coming from and what the parameters the algorythms that the computer programme uses to manipulate that data are. A recent example was in fully automating vehicle scheduling where the computer was sending vehicles out anything up to three hours late because of allowing for driver’s statutory rest periods.
Once the problem had been spotted it was relatively easy to reset some of the parameters the programme was using to make it do what was required, but an experienced human would have made different decisions and the problem would not have arisen.
Some systems are genuinely sophisticated. Take the software that controls a modern military aircraft. These are inherently unstable and cannot be flown in a conventional way, but the commuter systems take control inputs from the pilot and make the ‘plane fly accordingly. I am a lot happier with a conventional stick and rudder with some nice cables making things do what I ask, but then the sort of things that I flare not fast jets.
But back in the world of commercial decision making, or even personal decisions, we first need information and then need to know how to interpret it. We need to understand the consequences of our actions. All too often I see younger managers having an idea and going for it with no real critical thinking about whether or not it will work. There seems to be a culture of “I’m going to do this and it will work”.
I’m all for confidence, it’s a fundamental element of leadership, but blind confidence is dangerous. Yes, time for deliberation may not be plentiful, or even available, but a least have a process for decision making mapped out to that you can make the best decision in the time that you have. The more that you apply a decision making process you will, allied with the experience you have gained, get better and better at doing it.
It is also worth having a post mortem, not for apportioning blame, but to understand how closely the outcome matched your expectations. If you were lacking certain information then see what you can do to have it more readily available. If there were resource issues then try to find a way of getting faster access.
I once was asked how I was getting on a few days into a new job and relied that I couldn’t get my head out of the trench for long enough to work out which way the bullets were coming from. I was just fire fighting all day every day, but after a couple of weeks I was beginning to make progress. By improving information flow we started to get away from decision making being purely reactive and began to control our destiny.
Decision making needs to remain a human intervention. Even in a military aircraft the pilot is still making decisions: The software translates those decisions into action. It is a skill that we need to preserve, to take information, examine it critically and act on the choices that we make with a good understanding of what the consequences will be.
on management speak
A bit of an old topic here, but it has raised its ugly head with me lately and has sparked this post. As I have said here before I have a deep loathing of its use and if I ever slip into it, it will be simply in the form of parody or sarcasm.
In recent years my working life has kept me away from the sort of circles where management speak is usually found. I work in a niche world where we have our own patois made up of company, and industry sector, jargon, and I’m OK with that. But today, outside of work, I overheard someone talking about handling the first tranche of work with the second tranche due next month. What they meant was that they had the first job in hand and the next lot would be along in a few weeks, so why not say that?
Tranche is French for slice, or portion. It seemed to slip into business life, as an expression, in the Eighties as a general term when it had been in use for a hundred years or so in the financial sector regarding the issuing of bonds. It began to creep into the IT world around the time that I was leaving that discipline, but having slipped over into the world of logistics myself, there it was again.
There seems to be a need for people to try and make themselves sound clever by using alternative terms, and it also has the benefit of clouding understanding of what your are saying so that blame is harder to pin down when things don’t work out.
I have known some expert protagonists whose contributions to meetings have been stunning examples of talking for ten, twenty, thirty minutes or more and saying absolutely nothing of any substance, yet have been lauded as gurus. It is all akin the the Emperor’s New Clothes, in that people see what they want to see.
At one time, it started as a joke for a Christmas team meeting, I used the facility on PowerPoint to put a scrolling text across a slide. I would be stood there pontificating in full corporate lingo when, behind my back, a message would roll over the screen. I might be talking about a new contract and how we had worked hard to win it when my audience would see something like “This fell into his lap when the previous contractor pulled out” and then, over the next slide where I would be using all of the buzz phrases about how we were going to have a superb relationship with the new client, my listeners would see “They’re crap. They don’t pay and are complete bastards to work with which is why the other contractor legged it”
From this I put together a spoof presentation. Using every bit of management speak that I could think of; low hanging fruit, upper quartile, bucketise, get down into the weeds, circle the wagons, high level learnings, think outside the box, tick all the boxes, get on trend and many more. I worked these into something between Gilbert and Sullivan and Flanders and Swann, albeit speaking it rather than singing. Behind me, over a series of corporate information style slides, the banner would be either translating into plain English or saying things like “WTF is that supposed to mean?”. Sadly I can’t find a copy of it now, but I don’t get the opportunities to use it these days.
Taking the piss out of that way of talking was, to use another piece of management speak (MS), career inhibiting at times, but whilst I might have done better, I didn’t do too badly. At least I did what I did on my own terms and could look myself in the mirror.
Is management speak so bad? I love language and, whilst that is why I don’t like MS, could it just be a form of corporate patois that should be left alone? Perhaps it is, but, in my experience, it is too often used to plaster over incompetence. Even in its most benign usage it can render the truth opaque or even invisible. When someone presents to me using MS I don’t think that they are bright or clever, I think “What a plonker”. I think the same about anyone who is impressed by MS.
For a large chunk of my working life I have been, of necessity, a communicator. It has been fundamental to achieving my objectives to be clear about things and leave no room for ambiguity. Along the way one of the things that influenced the way that I speak was when I was working through simultaneous translation. It makes life easier for the translator and audience if what you say is stripped back ti the bare essentials.
Today we seem to have a need to enhance what we say. On a recent discussion about some work for a potential client I said, quite genuinely, that I was excited by the prospect of tackling that project. “But not super excited?” came the disappointed response. The realisation that I had probably blown my chance was balanced by the thought that I would not have to work for someone who talked in cliches, and their next few sentences confirmed that I should walk away. I did.
We have a beautiful language, and there is no need to mangle it.
on cars
Listening to colleagues, younger people, but aren’t they all these days, talking about their ideal car, should they have the cash, reminded me of one of the ways that I used to try to get myself off to sleep: I’ve won the lottery, so what cars will I buy.
I use the past tense because I don’t do it anymore. As much as I still love cars, there is not a new one on the market that I would really want to own. As a child I could tell the difference between any of the badge engineered offerings from Rootes or BMC, a Consul from a Zephyr or a Zodiac and all at a hundred yards or more. I truly lusted after cars and that passion stayed with me for a long time. Until fairly recently really, but now I survey the offerings around any car park and there is nothing that fires my juices.
Part of the problem is that there is so little difference between marques: The days when each make had its own house style are largely over. Aerodynamics or NCAP see to be blamed more that anything else, but I can rarely pick one make from another at just a glance, and there is just nothing there to excite me.
The other problem is in all all the electronic aids that come with a car now, and that have, for me and many others of my generation, taken the pleasure from driving. I do. to enjoy having a vehicle that wants to out think me.
There was a time when my Walter Mitty moment of unlimited funds would start with the purchase of an Aston Martin DB6. I thought those better looking that the DB5, and so that would always be top of my list. Than perhaps a Bentley. I preferred those to a Royce, a coupe rather than a saloon, but with a bit more luggage space for continental touring (the Berkshire Belle does not travel light). Then there would need to be something practical, especially for the Winter, so an all wheel drive of some sort, but not a Range Rover for pretty much the same reasons as avoiding a Royce. Finally an everyday car, and most nights, if I had not gone to sleep by this point, I would settle on a repmobile, with all available extras of course.
My prejudice is showing a little here, and I freely admit to some inverted snobbery. Whilst I don’t, generally, care what others think of me the are some cars that I know full well will pigeon hole you in most folk’s minds and therefore influence how they treat you on the road. My default driving philosophy is that every other driver is trying to kill me, so there is no need to further invite trouble.
And that brings another factor into choice of car: Modern driving is rarely a pleasure. Too many vehicles for too little tarmac, and most cars operated by people who are not real drivers. Just as there are many people who can get a tune out of a musical instrument, but far fewer genuine musicians, there are lots of people who can operate the controls of a car, but very few who can actually drive the thing. Modern driving aids don’t help as I mentioned above, but there are things about modern cars that I would not want to give up on.
The cars of my youth were often draughty and heating systems were hit and miss. Car radios were also very basic and overall reliability was an issue. Assuming I had unlimited funds, perhaps my ideal would be to take a modern car platform and clothe it in an approximation of a modern body. To some degree one of the favourite cars that I have owned in the last twenty years was just that. My S type Jaguar was a contempory American Lincoln chassis with a body that owed a lot to the MkII Jaguars of the 1950s/1960s.
Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be, and maybe I need to accept that my glory days of driving are over. At least I got to drive some good stuff of less crowded roads with rare speed checks. I’ve driven over 1,000,000 miles over two continents and nine countries in a variety of cars, vans and trucks. I’ve had my fun, so I’ll settle for riding around in our Japanese mid-sized SUV. If I want a bit of fun then I’ll do another track day like the one I did a couple of years ago when I took out three of my teenage dream cars on a closed circuit.
on going freelance
It’s coming up on fifteen years since I went freelance. I had been thinking about it for five years, having, in 2002, been looking at redundancy. The Berkshire Belle was in the same boat and so we had set up a limited company through which we could trade. As things worked out we both kept our full time employment, but then, for me, came a decision point in 2008.
It was time for my annual review, and I was heading up to London to meet my boss for lunch at the Institute of Directors. When I set out for the station that morning I had no thoughts about what the day might bring. Annual reviews were a chore that you went through and it was, in effect, a day off for me. A mid-morning train ride into Paddington, a decent lunch with a glass of wine and then back home to Swindon. I didn’t take my laptop or even a briefcase. The sun was shining on that early March morning and I was enjoying a day out.
From Paddington I used the Bakerloo line to Charing Cross and walked the half mile or so to the IoD. Meeting my boss there, he was using it as a base for several meetings that day, we had a brief chat and went in to eat. Things went well, and whilst it had not been a great year in terms of one area of work, the reasons for that were well understood and, in other areas I had done well. My bonus for the year was very acceptable and all that remained was to talk about the year ahead.
For each of the previous three years I had been, as they put it, parachuted into a different business division. I worked was a sort of non-executive member of the management team with no direct authority, but in an advisory capacity. In general my temporary colleagues viewed me as an unnecessary addition and I was made as welcome as the ex-boyfriend at the wedding, but there had been some progress and I had learned a lot. But what next?
In each of my previous cuckoo roles I had been able to work from home with the occasional overnight stay, but for 2008/09 they wanted me to work with a division based in Leeds and it was obvious that I would have to stay up there. I liked Leeds a lot, but to have to effectively live up there for a year was not something that I wanted to do. There was an option to find me a flat so that I didn’t have to stay in hotels, but I really wasn’t interested. I knew that to refuse the job meant that I was resigning, and suddenly that seemed the best choice.
We had a telephone conversation with the Personnel Director and a package was agreed. I handed in my mobile ‘phone on the spot, promised to take my laptop into the Birmingham office the next day and was on immediate gardening leave until the end of the month when Leaseplan would come and take away the Audi. I would get three months pay in lieu of notice and would formally leave the company at the end of March.
I left the IoD to walk back to the tube and, as I crossed Trafalgar Square, I was ten feet off the ground. I had not realised what a weight the job had become and freedom was exhilarating. Yes, the times ahead were uncertain, but I was going t go it alone. Every ‘phone call or email could bring a new adventure.
There were a lot of lows, more than there were highs, but I got to work in all sorts of places including Ireland, Columbia, Libya, Thailand and, twice, in China. I worked with companies from SMEs to global businesses with various governments in between and, apart from a couple of rogues, always got paid.
One thing did not change once I gave up the fat salary, private health care and flash car and that was the work ethic. Being your own boss is one thing, but if you don’t work you don’t get paid and the more that you work the more you earn. It is not an easy option, but you stand or fall on your own; own decisions, own quality of work, your own merits. There is no safety net.
on memories
I think that I have a decent memory still, and have a lot of memories amassed over 7 decades, but how reliable is it? A couple of recent experiences have shaken my faith a little.
There is a problem with 1971 where, as I have mentioned here before, I suffered an industrial accident in early ’72 and forgot most of the previous twelve months. I still can’t piece together that bit of my life too well and rely on what others have told me, and some inescapable facts, to reconstruct things.
It is from that period that the second experience came this morning. Back in ’71 there was a car chase movie called Vanishing Point. As a car guy I took myself along to the Odeon in Romford to see it. I think that I went on my own, although I was in a relationship at that time, but I kept dozing off though the film and my recollection of it was that it was boring. However, it was on Talking Pictures yesterday and so I recoded it to watch this morning.
One memory was correct: It was boring, and I stopped watching around the half-way mark and deleted it. But there was something else. Very early in the opening credits comes the name Jimmy Bowen as music supervisor. Now back then I thought that I have an unusual surname, and knew no other Bowens beside my namesake who wrote scripts and books, so how come I don’t remember seeing something as obvious as Jimmy B? Maybe I was looking at something else at that moment in the cinema? It jarred with me seeing it today, yet having had no recollection, so maybe it is just something else that I lost when I got the bang on the head.
The other dodgy memory is TV related. Howard’s Way is on again and the Berkshire Belle and I elected to watch it. Now my memories of seeing the first episodes when it first came out are that I watched it when I lived over in Marks Tey, in darkest Northeast Essex, but looking it up on IMDB it was first shown in September 1985, a year after I had moved to Swindon. The penultimate series on TV when the Berkshire Belle and I got together.
Both are trivial incidents, I know, but do demonstrate how unreliable memories can be. I do check a lot of things using the wonders of the internet, although care needs to be taken even there. Does it matter? Not really, but I do have a nagging concern about dementia and the Wonder of Wokingham and I watch each other carefully for signs having experienced both of our Mothers go that way.
At least what I do remember gives me pleasure. Sure, I have bad memories too, but I leave them alone and take comfort from the good ones. If they are a little flawed I don’t mind, I’m happy with them as they are. After all, I do have a lot of them.
on mental health
My mental health is my business and yours is yours. If you want to share your problems the I have no issue with that, but I really don’t want to share mine.
Some of that comes from my age. I am of a different generation, once removed from the one that went through the Second World War and we lived through the threat of a nuclear war along the way. My father served in the Royal Navy during WW2. I know from his service records that one of his ships was not inly sunk, but that the one that rescued him was sunk too. He did not talk about his wartime experiences other than occasionally mentioning some of the places that he saw.
I was brought up around people who did not share their problems too widely. You might confide in a close friend, but that was it. The idea of confiding in a stranger was unthinkable, but did we emerge from this as generations of twisted people? No. Of course there were some who had issues, but, in general, we got on with life.
It’s about experience. The old expression “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, like most old adages, is based in truth. I think that I was lucky to have lived in the period that I grew up in simply because I grew up. Life was hard and certainly was not fair, but we got on with it. We took the knocks and toughened up. We had to because we knew that life would hit us again sometime.
Somewhere along the way, as we tried to do the best for our children, and their children, we softened them up and then they took it further. All this cobblers about “No losers”. Of course there are losers and someone is going to come last. So what? We should be striving to make ourselves as strong as we can be, not a bunch of no-hopers. There will always be people who excel, and we should celebrate that, encourage it.
I feel very sorry for modern generations who can’t seem to cope with anything. There is so much help on offer and I hope that people can make use of it, but the real answer has to come from within. It’s your mind and, in the end, only you can manage it.
on stupidity
OK, I am old, and it is a fact of life that times change. Old gets like me are out of touch and all that, long live the generation gap (or gaps, in my case). I get all that stuff because, if you think about it, I was young once too. I’ve done it all in my time.
The thing is though, and I know it’s our fault because we bred you lot, and your parents. We voted, or didn’t, and have, along the way, allowed a lot of crap to infect society, or which the worst factor is that we have created a world full of idiots.
When I was young we were competitive. We wanted to be better that our parents. We wanted to be better than each other. Being a gormless idiot was not on our radar, and nor was just being one of the mediocrity. We understood winning and losing and, whilst we wanted to be winners, we were prepared to risk losing to get there.
Knowledge and understanding were vital and we sought knowledge. Looking stupid was an anathema, so it bemuses me when I see examples of stupidity almost being celebrated these days. How did we let it happen? The silent majority have a lot to answer for.
What sent me off on this musing was media coverage of motorists who had been caught out over the holiday period when their electric cars needed charging as they headed around visiting friends and relatives. Some of the quotes were priceless and, whilst I have some sympathy with folks who have been stuck at motorway services for hours, they brought it upon themselves.
I’ve driven for years, and one of the basics of self-preservation is that, before setting off, you check to make sure that you have enough fuel for your journey. On the times when even a full tank would not be enough I would have a plan about when and where to refuel so that I could get back. Electric cars don’t have enough range for many of the journeys that were being undertaken, yet people set off anyway, assuming that they could get to a charging point when they needed one, despite it being blindingly obvious that they would have a problem.
Then you got the seemingly considerable number for whom it came as a surprise that using car heat would reduce their range. Hello, where do you think the power for the heat comes from? You’ll have the same problem with the air-con in the Summer. OK, some scared do have the capability to generate power on the move for powering auxiliaries, but it would seem that I lot of people set off with no real plan for their journey and I’ll bet that most of them did not have a Winter survival kit one board either in case they did get stranded.
The number of people who claimed that this was their first major journey in their electric car just made things worse. Ignorance is no excuse, and if we are in a position where the planet has limited resources, then why are we allowing these idiots to waste them? I can’t normally be bothered to get angry, but this gets me close.
This is just one example, but the problem of “nobody warned us” is everywhere now. Take responsibility. Learn, do your research, take pride in knowing, but don’t be certain (that’s another story). Just be sure that you have worked it out and own your decision.
The accusation from the young that we fucked up the planet is partially true; we bred our accusers and allowed them to grow up as snowflakes with a level of ignorance that would have been wholly unacceptable in our day. For that m’led, I plead guilty.
on computers and me, part seven
I had planned to go freelance in the early Noughties, after an impending takeover of my employer made it likely that I might be shown the door. Instead, I was one of those kept on and, for the Berkshire Belle, something similar happened, and so the opportunity for us to go back into a working partnership slipped away. However, we had formed a limited company and needed a web site, email et al.
At home the original Amstrad PC was long gone, replaced initially by a Packard Bell, then one mail ordered from Mesh, in turn swapped for another ordered on the web from Dell. All of these were upgraded as and when necessary, with more RAM, bigger hard drives, faster processors and so on. We had adopted the Web fairly early, back in the dial-up when required days, then to an always-on connection and then Wi-Fi, and so moving to having our own website was a new adventure.
Around the time of setting up a registered company we also bought a holiday home in Florida and were planning on renting that out. That needed another web site and, with two domains registered and parked, we needed content. One of my team at work had a son who was getting into web design and offered to do the Florida villa site for us. He set up a landing page using some software that he had (Dreamweaver rings a bell) and we uploaded it. That one page took all of the memory available within the hosting package that I had bought.
There had to be a better way, and so I bought an HTML book and wrote the first two websites myself. High quality images for the villa site took up a lot of space, but by avoiding all of the baggage that comes with using a software package we were fine and avoided the exorbitant hosting costs that I would have had to incur to support what my colleague’s son was producing. All of that economic and sleek programming philosophy that I had been taught in my COBOL days, when we only had about 1K of memory to play with, came to the fore, but this time in HTML. In the end we had more than ten web sites as I ran various business ventures in my efforts to make a crust, but most of these are long gone now and I have not written any HTML since 2019 when we sold the villa.
I did enjoy it though. Whilst I didn’t get around to building a PC from scratch, the constant upgrading and programming gave me a lot of pleasure. The latter also saved us a fair bit of money with it all being done in-house. I am starting to miss it and, having moved the last couple of websites over to WordPress, it is like being in a straight jacket. I will get the hang of WP at some point, but I find it harder to use now than I did when I started with it, for every upgrade that is supposed to help seems to make it harder to do anything.
This is one of my beefs about computers. I don’t want them to think for me unless I ask them to, and, with every software upgrade, I find that I am turning off features. I used to love Lotus software because it was very easy to customise, and I was sad when they vanished. My early prejudice against Windows (I was very snobby about it when it first arrived) dissipated and I can remember the excitement when I got my hands of Windows 95 to upgrade whatever PC we had back then. These days I almost dread a new version of software and can rarely find anything that helps me very much in terms of what I want to do.
It isn’t just computers in desktop/laptop/tablet forms. The computer interference in my cars is equally maddening. I first encountered this in 2002 when I had a new Land Rover Freelander and, one damp evening on the run home from Newcastle to Swindon, decided to relieve my boredom on the Brackley by-pass. Deliberately chucking the Freelander into a roundabout to get the back to break away I was faced with all sorts of mayhem and the car’s brain tried to get me out of something that I had provoked and was perfectly capable of dealing with it if it would only leave me to it. Fortunately, between us, I did not end up in the ditch. Even turning off traction control didn’t entirely solve the problem and I resigned myself to another fun aspect of driving had gone.
My current car has a marked tendency to sulk if I transgress in some way and I am frequently bonged at for my sins. That reminds me of some of my early experiences with satellite navigation systems. I am a maps man: I have been since I bought myself an old world atlas for sixpence at a jumble sale when I was about seven. My navigation skills have often been commented on and I usually say that I am a direct descendent of Vasco da Gama (although he was actually lost most of the time). But sat-nav came along and I use it from time to time, but I used to switch the voice so that I got the instructions in German. I used to call my navigator Brunhilda and would love to piss her off by ignoring her and going my own way. She never did try to get me to invade Poland though: Probably didn’t trust me not to go after Denmark instead.
I was equally snobby about Apple at one time. I had come across an Apricot PC back in 1987 when I filled in for someone for three months and it was what they were using. I did get the hang of it, but it was Microsoft operating systems that I became used to at work and at home. Apple seemed to me to be all style over substance. The change came when the Berkshire Belle bought me an iPod for Christmas. It still took a long time, but then an iPad mini came along from the same source. Then I got my first iPhone. Eventually, also leaned on heavily by number one daughter, I bought the MacBook Air on which this blog is being written.
The transition has not been easy. There is still a lot about the way a Mac works that drives me bonkers and I still have two HP laptops that are about twelve years old and have been much travelled; North and South America, Libya, China, Thailand and more. One is still on Windows 7, the other recently upgraded to Windows 11 (I’ve also got the HP PC that used to be in the villa, I don’t use it too often, but…).
Another “helpful” aid that drives me mad is tapping. I came across it with no warning when I acquired the first of the HP laptops I mentioned just now. I was setting it up and at some point, dragging my finger across the touchpad, I ran out of pad, lifted my finger to move it over a bit and then, as it landed back on the pad, things happened. Eek (that’s a polite word: I used something stronger). I couldn’t understand what was happening, the bloody thing seemed to have a mind of its own. I plugged in a mouse, got control back, found that I had encountered tapping and turned it off. The MacBook has a form of tapping, but I’ve somehow got used to that and don’t have any issues, but, having tried it again on both HPs, it has me screaming in seconds.
Another thing that infuriates me is the dumb insolence that computers can demonstrate. Stroppy teenagers have nothing on them. You try to load some new software, or to delete some old stuff or similar and get a message that tells you it hasn’t done what you asked because you have a file open. If you know that I have a file open, THEN TELL ME WHICH ONE IT IS AND I’LL CLOSE IT! There are ways around these things, of course, but there have been many times when there has almost been a laptop sized hole in the window.
But computers have been good to me. I have had a working life that took me from the shop floor to the boardroom, and that path really took off when I applied for the programmer’s job. If I had not have taken that route, then I would never have met the Berkshire Belle. She and I have been together for thirty-three years now, nearly half of my life, not quite half of hers. Computers may give me grief from time to time, but they have given me a lot of pleasure. I’ll forgive them anything for giving me the woman of my dreams.
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