Power Up

I was given a tablet for Christmas. This was not simply a way of getting me to shut up and be quiet it was in fact an Android tablet. An ipad but not an ipad. We are now in a quite deeply committed relationship. Despite working in an industry where I know how to work a reasonable amount of fancy pants equipment (although my Dad still doesn’t trust me with their sky+) computers and I have never really got along. I bought my first lap top about seven years ago from PC world. I got the well known brand Lenovo– yep you heard me. I got it home, turned it on and nothing happened. It would not come to life. I charged it for a couple of years. Still it wouldn’t turn on. I returned to PC world and explained, half laughing, that the computer I had bought for them the previous day didn’t even turn on. They told me it was not their problem and I would have to take it up with the manufacturer and gave me a help line to call. I asked if I could use their phone. No.

I rung the help line, they told me to return it to the shop. I said I couldn’t. They said they’d call me back, they did, I explained it to 15 people. I cried. A Swedish man told me ‘ I think you need to have a cup of tea, I’ll call you back in ten minutes’. I did, he did. The upshot of it was they sent a man to my house to replace the entire motherboard and I developed a great hatred on PC world. The computer was…OK. I could type on it which was all I really wanted to do. I got used to turning it on a couple of days before I wanted to use it so it had times to come to terms with it. I never asked it to upload photos or anything complicated which would cause it to just shut down. Then one day I accidently upended a cup of tea in to the keyboard. The computer locked itself and the keys refused to work. I dried it out with a hairdryer and by sitting it next to the oven. Half the keys still refused to work. Sadly the half which made up the password to unlock the computer.

Over time I could get in. The delete still refused to work so I got used to highlighting and overwriting. The space bar only works if you slam it, so I stopped working in the library. I would type hundreds of words and look up to see that I had been typing on only three keys and I had written in some kind of experimental vowel only language. I borrowed a computer and finished the novel. I now have some weird superstition that until it’s sold I shouldn’t buy a new laptop. So I may be some time.

But now I have the tablet. And we have a deep bond going on. I was always fairly anti kindles – I didn’t think you could beat a real book. I still think that. But when you’re on the commute home and you finish your book isn’t it a lot easier to have a device where there are hundreds there waiting for you? When you’re lying in bed and you’re suddenly overwhelmed with the desire to read Mallory Towers isn’t it great that you don’t have to wait for the library to open or trawl second hand book shops. When you are reading a Lesley Pierce or an Emma Blair isn’t it great that no one can see the cover and assume you are illiterate but rather keen on the poverty and bizarre incestuous lifestyles of 1930s Britain?

I have also cut down on my paper recycling by downloading the papers on to my tablet. Haven’t quite worked out how to do the crossword yet but I’m sure I’ll crack it sooner or later.
And best of all – the flipping thing turns on