Watch me, and follow me carefully

 

 

 

 

 

 

I may have done teacher training for Further Education and taught for the whole of my career in Britain in Secondary Education, but there is a part of me that thinks that I would have been more satisfied in Primary.

     I don’t mean the Primary Education of today with restrictions on what an individual teacher can teach and with assessment testing at every whipstitch, but rather in the more ample days when teachers had the latitude to gain objectives by using their individual initiative in the classroom and creating learning opportunities with paper, scissors, glue, and other materials.

     There is something magical in standing up in front of a class with a sheet of plain A4 paper and saying, “I want you to start folding your sheet of paper like this.”  The hands-on experience of something as mundane as folding a piece of paper and, sometimes tearing bits off, always engaged pupils – and gave them a sense of satisfaction if they actually managed to follow the instructions!

     My greatest achievement in paper folding and sticking in Secondary School was, in one double period, getting the class to write a short script with a couple of scene changes and then create a miniature stage, complete with proscenium arch with flying scenery and paper puppets to act out the script.

     At the end of the double-period I was a frenetic, gibbering wreck and the kids were hysterical, but we got it all done and there was a real sense of achievement.  What the kids were like going on to their next lessons I didn’t have the energy with which to speculate, but I wouldn’t have liked to be teaching them!

     These exhausting memories came back when I was trying to complete a fairly simple task, where the thinking bits had already been done and all that was required was for the ideas to be worked out with the programs and the materials that I had to hand.

     And one of those tools was Word.  In all its glory.

 

 

 

     As someone who learned to type on a ‘real’ typewriter (and has a certificate to prove it!) the ease with which Word does what it took me hours to painstakingly work out makes many of the skills that I learned completely redundant.

     The example of the centred menu comes to mind.  Today, with a program like Word, all you have to do is type out the items in the menu, highlight, and click centre, and it’s done.  It was not like that in the Old Days.  Just take the title: M E N U

     The word ‘menu’ has four letters, in the example above I have added a space between the letters making a total of seven key strikes.  Knowing the total number of keystrokes in an A4 sheet of paper, you subtracted your 7 key strikes from the total and then divided the remainder by two to get the number of spaces that you would have to leave to get the word MENU exactly centred on the page.  The space bar of the typewriter could be depressed and held down which moved the carriage of the machine forward a half-space, so that the spaces could accommodate and half-space when the sums were done!

     I am delighted that such labour is now behind us, and Word offers so much more.  Not, of course that the normal user of the program understands or even guesses at just how much power there is in the program.

     As I keep saying, I use my highly sophisticated computer as a glorified typewriter and am constantly grateful that I do not have to use Tippex (in liquid or sheet form) to correct my mistakes.  Indeed, the program usefully corrects things it decides are typos as you go along and then there is the click on ‘Editor’ which lists errors it has found and offers you the chance to do something about them.

     Typewriter keys could not be changed, you were stuck with the typeface that the keys had.  No choice.  Now, only your imagination and the depth of your pocket limit the typefaces that you have at your fingertips.

     But, for me, the problems start when I start to use the power of the program and go beyond the glorified typewriter status that my machine usually has.

     The challenge that I had was to have things going in different directions rather than sticking to the usual top to bottom, left to right order of things.  And I was trying something new.

     Now, after years of Toni saying the same thing when I start moaning about how to do something, “Go on YouTube and ask!” I have finally found that what he has been saying has some merit and somewhere on YouTube, as long as you ask the right questions, you will find that some saddo or other has gone to the trouble of making a semi-coherent film giving you some pointers towards an answer to your problem.

     My problems are usually, not that I am using Word, after all, who doesn’t? 

     My problems come when I realise that I have been looking at an explanation that doesn’t cover the fact that I am not using a Windows machine, I am using a Mac, and there are and always have been subtle differences, but differences big enough to cause almost complete nervous collapse as you try and work out why the simple instructions do not work for you.

     Eventually, I find a way – or rather I find the set of instructions that go with my Mac and with the version of Word that I am using.  But time has passed, and I know that the next time that I try and do something similar, I will have forgotten a simple but essential step that gives success.

     But that is part of the price you pay for not having to count up spaces to centre a heading.  And, on balance it’s a price worth paying.

 

Sheep and goats!

 

There are, as is well known, two types of people in the world: those who find stationery (with an ‘e’ for envelope) endlessly fascinating - and those that don’t.

I am, enthusiastically and terminally, in the first category.

One can speculate about how such fixations develop, and I have thought back to my childhood, and I think that I can see the reasons that I am how I am.

My first ‘remembered’ pocket money was 6d (sixpence in old money or 2½p in the ‘new’) even in those distant days that was not much.  It would have bought me 24 blackjacks, 6 chews or one and a bit sherbet fountains: and it had to last a week.

This is where the lure of stationery comes in.  You could buy drawing pins or paper clips with part of your money and you got lots of ‘things’.  You didn’t ever use them all, but it was a real example of plenty for not very much.  Like staples.

Not every six or seven year-old would ask for a stapler for Christmas - but I did.  And I got one too (my parents probably delighted that a childish wish could be fulfilled at such little expense!) they may have been delighted, but it could not possibly match my ecstasy on owning a grey, sleek, official-looking piece of grown-up machinery.  There was not, it must be admitted, a whole stack of papers that I needed to staple, but the fact that I could if I needed to was the point.  And the further point is that a stapler needs staples, and for a very small outlay you could get a thousand of them.  A thousand!

It was the same with notebooks: lots of pages for small amounts.  It almost seemed a pity to have to write in them.  Which, again if I am fair, I seldom did.  It was the ownership of flickable blank pages that really mattered.

As I grew older I was able to rationalise my addiction into defined ‘necessity’: I needed folders for schoolwork.  And clips.  And pens.  And rubbers.  And Tippex.  And so it went on.

Any new system for stationery organization or display had my attention.  The different folders that I purchased usually had differing configurations of holes for the paper - and that necessitated the purchase of hole punches, and then the purchase of those paper Polos that you stuck around the holes to stop the paper from tearing through over use.

From where I sit typing this I can see two domestic paper guillotines to my right; behind me is a long arm stapler purloined from my last school (with the full knowledge of the senior management team); on a shelf in front, the thermal binder is next to the ring binder; further along is the plastificator, with A4, A5 and card sized plastic sleeves; there is a printer within arm’s reach, to say nothing of the serious table-mounted guillotine that can slice through 500 pages at once.

I have enough pens and pencils (for which, incidentally I have an electric sharpener) to supply a school; I have various small staplers (with staples) and a staple remover; I have post-it notes in many sizes and colours; I have stickers (both festive and plain); plastic rulers, metal rulers, cutters, tape dispensers, Dymo machines (manual and electric) and a bewildering array of magnifying glasses.

I am insatiable in my need for aspects of the stationeryatorial possibilities - even if I have nowhere to put my acquisitions and struggle to find a use for those I already have.  But I don’t smoke and so I am ‘allowed’ a minor aberration or three.

As with watches (I will go into that in another post) I am searching.  Searching for perfection.  In this case the perfect pen.

I much prefer to write with ink through a fountain pen nib and, over the years, Parker, Montblanc and Sheaffer have been purchased and gifted to me.  And I have lost the lot.  Some blotty biros stay with me for years, but give me a decent fountain pen and it will be lost before the ink cartridge empties!

I eventually found a solution that met my inky needs and my propensity to mislay, by discovering the pre-filled disposable fountain pen.  A wasteful extravagance, but one that I embraced.  The nib was a good match for my scribbled writing and seemed to be able to cope with my destructive scrawl through the length of the reservoir of ink, and the smallish cost of the thing meant that it didn’t really matter if I lost it.  This attitude of course encouraged me to buy the things in relative bulk so that I could, as it were, go on finding the ‘lost’ pens in a continuous serendipitous discovery process, before they too were lost in the never ending cycle of my stationery life.

Which brings me to Lidl, or possibly Aldi, but certainly one or the other.  Catalonia, unlike the UK, does not start putting out the ‘Back to School’ merchandise on the first day of the summer holiday, they wait until the calendar indicates that it is only a despairing teacher’s scream away from the start of term.  So, it was in early September that I noted a matched set of pen, roller ball and packet of ink cartridges set out alluringly in one of those impossible to breach plastic bump packs.  “Why not?”, I thought rhetorically, and put one in my basket.

It was only when I got home that I discovered that the design on the barrel of each of the writing instruments, that I had thought to be vaguely Orientally inspired, was actually an open, monster’s claw.  I am going to continue using it in the expectation that other people will, like me, take the graphic to be bamboo rather than something else beginning with the letter ‘b’ related to the gruesome that I can’t think of.

As I am wise in the ways of ink cartridge fountain pens, I knew that while one cartridge was feeding the nib, an extra cartridge should be able to be fitted into the empty space of the barrel.  And it could and was.

I then turned to the rollerball.  And it didn’t work.  And it continued not to work even after some vigorous flicking to get the ink to flow.  Disgruntled I dismantled the pen to find that there was nothing inside.  I mean there was no refill there.  Nothing.  I then realised that the thing actually used the cartridges supplied.

This was a revelation!  It is surely a rule that the refills for rollerballs come complete with ink supply and nib, like the refills for ballpoint pens.  But I also realised that I had never seen an ink cartridge rollerball pen before.  And I further realised that, if a roller ball could work with an ink cartridge - why hadn’t it been done before?  Perhaps it has been done, but for something that momentous to escape my stationery eye would be remarkable.

It must be greed.

It is said that HP printer ink is one of the most expensive liquids on the planet. The cost of the printer machine has fallen dramatically over the years, but that it because the companies know that they can make so much more money by customers buying their ink.  Even a cursory exploration on the Internet about how computer printer companies limit the life of the ink cartridge in the printers is easy to find and surely, is little more than theft.  There are, allegedly, chips inside printers that count up the number of copies that you make and, at a number decided by the company, the machine will begin to display error messages urging you to buy a new cartridge, irrespective of whether you actually need one or not, and if you do not buy a new one, then the machine will simply stop printing.

This is yet another example of the planned obsolescence exemplified by the light bulb.  There is one electric light bulb that has been burning continuously for over 100 years and I believe that it had its own website and there is a camera trained on it so those with nothing better to do can stare at a lighted lamp and think about all the light bulbs that they have thrown away because they have ‘blown’.  

It’s funny, too, isn’t it, that modern cars don’t seem to rust like they used to?  New technology has nothing, or little to do with it, manufacturers have known how to make cars rustproof for years, but they got more money by ensuring that expensive welding would be needed after a certain number of years, ensuring too a continual replacement of the vehicles.  And don’t get me started on coffee capsules!

In spite of these examples, and many more, that show the uncaring nature of capitalism and the gullibility of we the consumers, I am still enthralled to know that I now posses a roller ball that uses ink cartridges.

And, in yet another example of how the things around me don’t really change, I couldn’t find it to get a real look at the design.

But it will turn up and it will give me pleasure when I find it.  Though I may not, or indeed, ever really use it.  

But that response is the nature of addiction and I am working on it.  

Sometime or other.

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