Our computer has died. The opinion of nicely husky-voiced Indian sounding helpline-woman from DELL (who made me fiddle around inside the tower's casing and listen for any beeps it might, or might not, make) is that the motherboard has snuffed it. Once we've got that fixed we'll see if the hard drive is still going. Guess who hasn't backed anything up for the past two years...
Go on, guess...
A man turned up yesterday with a new motherboard. It didn't fix the problem. His opinion was that the motherboard he had bought all the way from Inverness was buggered too. "They do that," he said. "It's been sat on a shelf for five years."
Five years is a long time in computering.
(It's a long time to sit on a shelf too. Not sure I'd like to try it.)
After we had hoovered all the pterodactyl shit out of the computer's fans, and made a phone call to his boss, it was decided that taking the tower up to the shelf of ageing mobos, then trying them one by one till they got one that works, was going to be more time-efficient than dragging the aged mobos, one by one, half way across the country to the computer. Smart people computer engineers.
UPS are collecting the machine sometime on Monday - or so the rather gorgeously sounding husky-voiced, South African accented DELL arranging-picking-up-things desk woman assures me. (This is a hell of a good move on DELL's part; staffing their phones with efficient seductively-voiced women with a variety of interesting accents. It's guaranteed to flatter the ego of any British male implying that there is an international team of hot totty working around the globe trying to solve his problems. Brings out the James Bond in a man it does. Unfortunately Dave, the bloke who turned up to do the actual fixing, didn't look a bit like Pussy Galore but we can't have everything.)
Meanwhile I'm typing this on the other even older desktop machine (serial ports and PS2 mouse, people!) which, even running the supposedly lightweight Linux XUbuntu, falls over if you look at it wrongly. It just stops. Ask it to do too much too fast and.... pewwwwwwww.... reboot time! I've rediscovered the SAVE button.
I suspect it is a result of my trying to get my daughters out of the annoying and horrible habit of using the word 'like' as punctuation* but I have become more aware of similes recently. They seem to be jumping out at me from the page a little more often than usual.
Especially bad ones.
Here's one that tripped me up today from The Weight of a Feather, a less than good (self published?) collection of short 'stories' by a South African author called Judy Croome.
...his head bobbing up and down like a yo-yo stretched too far on the arc of its elastic.
What!? Has this woman ever played with a yo-yo? Does she think a yo-yo is just a heavy round lump on the end of a rubber band? And why a bent one? Who strings yo-yos with elastic? Maybe they do in South Africa. I should have asked the Woman From DELL on the phone.
*I know it's as pointless as King Canute sticking his finger in the windmills but you have to try, don't you?
