We Can't Repair It!

 

 

My garage man has admitted defeat.  After three days of trying to sort out my faulty air con he has admitted that the only real solution is to take the car to the dealer as they have ensured that some aspects of the repair can only be completed by the dealership. 

     One would have thought that air con is hardly an essential system in the running of the car and that repairing it would be something that any tom dick or harry (should those have been capitalized?) would be able to do.  “But,” I was told, “your car is a hybrid,” and that means that all bets are off.

     Even I know that nowadays given the electronic complexity of cars even a simple jump start is something that doesn’t work in modern vehicles and any attempt to try such a positively medieval technique to get the vehicle going again could result in serious damage to both car and also to the human trying to get things moving again.

     My car has an engine and two (count them) two batteries.  This I discovered when one of them stopped working and so did the car.  This was another of those circumstances when ‘return to dealer’ was necessary to get things sorted out.  My problems with the air con are akin to those that you have with the printer.

     It used to be said in the old days of vinal, turntables, hi fi systems, and loudspeakers, that the weakest part of the system was the loudspeaker.  I took the word of whoever felt qualified to say such a thing, whereas my assumption was the disc itself was the most unlikely part of the system, where stereo sound of a full orchestra was coaxed out of a needle going up and down and side to side in micro grooves on a piece of circular plastic.  But what do I know about these things.

     But if records were inherently unlikely sources of rich orchestral sound, printers seem to be constructed to frustrate and infuriate the owner and user.

     I have no intention of restating the evil nature of the pricing of printing ink, making it one of the most expensive liquids that normal people buy, or the horror stories that are repeated all over the internet whereby printers have secret electronic tagging of the number of copies produced and insist that a printer is out of ink when some arbitrary number of copies has been reached, in spite of hearing said ink sloshing around when the ludicrously complicated engineering of the ink cartridge is shaken.  And why is there no standardization for the cartridges?  And yes, that is a rhetorical question.

     One of my printers (and yes, I have more than one, doesn’t everybody?) there are reservoirs for the ink which can simply be poured into the receptacle, and it doesn’t have to be the machines’ own make, any old ink will do.  If that works, why isn’t it standard for all bloody printers.

     The answers are obvious, and they are all to do with money.

     In the dark nights of the soul that visit everyone who has ever tried to print something that needs to be done ‘now’ so that it can be sent off today, knows – that is the time that the printers is at its best-worst.  As it tells you that it has run out of paper, in spite of the tray being well stocked with A4, that there is no cyan ink, in spite of the fact that you are printing text in simple black, that there is a paper jam in spite of the fact that there is no paper anywhere except where it should be.  And then there is the message that tells you that the printer is not connected when you are standing next to the bloody thing with a computer that is sending information to it.

     If you can deal with printers, the logic goes, you can deal with anything.  It is always encouraging, that in a world of ever-increasing technological sophistication, problems can often still be sorted out by the simple expedient of, “turn it off and on again”.

     Unfortunately, this technique does not extend to faulty air con systems in hybrid cars.  More’s the pity.

     I am building up my strength to deal with all the faff and expense of getting things done.

     At least the pool is open on Monday so I can swim my cares away!

 

The trackpad that lost its click

Once upon a time, and a very long time ago, when Windows 3 was ravaging the land (reducing grown men to bitter tears of impotent rage) with its malevolent vagaries, one hapless seeker after gadgets stumbled upon a machine with an operating system that seemed specifically designed to invite humans to interact, allowing (nay, encouraging) adherents to be instinctive and logical in their responses to particular problems and lo! they were resolved!  The Holy Grail of computer systems had been found, and that system was enshrined in a Mac.

The Gadget Seeker was hooked.  And he stayed faithful, even though he was so lonely in his affirmation of the Wonders of the Mac because all his friends, colleagues and virtually everyone else in his little world owed allegiance to the false gods of Microsoft.  He stayed faithful, even when he discovered that the Grand Mufti of Microsoft had a secret decree that forbade those programs that worked on Windows from working with Mac – even though it said it would on the box!  Such deception!  So unlike the friendly, civilized world of Mac.

And the Seeker was true unto the Mac, and lavished praise and pounds, and more pounds, to affirm his faith, buying anything and everything that Mac made.  Soon his electronic life was enriched by iPod, iPad, iPhone, MacBook Air and a mighty all-in-one.

But our little Seeker didn’t realize that the providers of this profusion of goodies were no longer the welcoming, helpful, altruistic innovators of old – they had become hard and calculating.  They had progressed from their lowly garage cradle and had been shown the riches of the world - and they had Fallen, because the Voice had said that all of those riches could be theirs!

The Seeker was beguiled and listened not to the voices of reason that told him that his devotion was being manipulated and that he was being taken for a very expensive ride.  He clove unto the beauty of the design and the thinness and the lightness thereof and said that his eyes were wide open and he was prepared to suffer for his faith.  A little.

And the cost of his devotion was ever rising and he appeared to be getting ever less important ‘stuff’ for his money and doubt began to sow its seeds.

And then the dark minds that held sway in the realms of Mac began to flaunt their power and produced such vapid things as the Apple Watch - that was not really a patch on the Pebble and cost oh-so-much-more!  And the murmurings grew.

At last, as was inevitable, there was the Golden Calf Moment in the Messianic Empire of Mac and they flung a gewgaw of great price but little worth in front of their fanatics and screamed, “Buy!”  Behold!  It was the iPhone 6, and it was ridiculously expensive for what it was, but the Demons of Mac said, “Believe - and Buy!”  And many did.

But the veil was torn from the faithful eyes of the Seeker and he repudiated his faith (though not to the extent of getting rid of all the Mac stuff that he had, or not using it, or anything silly like that!) and vowed to turn towards Windows in a Dell.

Which he did, so now his MacBook Air (once his Pride and Joy) is now relegated to his jobbing ‘second’ laptop!  Ho!, and yet again, Ho!

But fate had yet a sneaky trick to play.

The trackpad of his main computer (a Mac) became skittish and refused to bend to his will.  And he was wroth.  It looked perfectly normal from the top.  Underneath, however, one of the two ‘pimple’ foot-bumps had become dislodged.  Its design was simple, it looked like the top half of a very small spaceship: a curved ‘dome’ with a circular flat flange around it.  That flange was supposed to fit underneath the bottom casing, but, try as he might, the Seeker could not get that flange in the hole, or at least not enough of it to make the connection secure. 

He knew that there must be a ‘knack’ to its re-insertion, or that there would be some useful (but specifically and exclusively Mac-type tool) that would facilitate the operation.  He also knew that there was a small Mac Temple in the town where the Followers of Mac-dom would work their magic.

Hoping that the practitioners would not be able to guess that he was an apostate, he tentatively entered the Temple and proffered the offending touch-pad with a simperingly dismissive smile at the simplicity of the challenge it offered to the Geniuses. 

The Chief Priest of the Mac Temple looked at the touchpad, looked at the foot, looked at the hole and made a few ineffectual attempts to reinsert the thing.  In much the same inept way, it has to be admitted that the Seeker had done.  Eventually, the Chief Priest turned to the Seeker and said, “The Engineer will have to look at this.  He will decide if anything can be done.  It may not be possible.”

The Seeker was puzzled, astonished, nay dumbfounded  Where was the specially designed tool for this particular job which could, obviously, only be used for this particular foot replacement?  Where was the easy display of ‘knack’ showing how melodiously simple and ‘right’ everything Mac was?

“Come back in one hour!” said the Chief Priest in a voice heavy with lugubriousness.  With a sinking heart, illusions shattered, despondency settling on him like dust from disintegrating floppy disks, the Seeker left

.

The hour passed.  He returned.

And lo! The job had been done!  The offending trackpad was brought to the Seeker by a lowly Server, who turned to the Chief Priest with a questioning look.

The Chief Priest looked at the trackpad long and hard, then he looked at the Seeker, then back to the trackpad and then, in a voice drained of emotion, he said, “That’s OK!” and dismissed the Seeker with a half-hearted wave.

Stammering his thanks, the Seeker backed out of the Temple, the only man to get something for nothing from Mac!

MORAL: Sometimes money isn't everything.

ANTI-MORAL: If you get lucky once - run!