My Week of Armageddon

Have you got five minutes reader? What a dreadful week!

My i-phone decided to melt down and I had to completely update it. This meant reinstalling a heap of things like email accounts, WhatsApp and so forth. I spoke to one of our daughters on the phone. Her voice hovered between a tut and sympathetic ear, ever the diplomat but firm in her accusation. “Dad things just happen to you when it comes to computers.” 

Fortunately, readers we can keep all of this quiet can’t we; I mean let’s keep this story to just the two of us. At least it’s only you and me who read these little side comments. 

My daughter meant I was useless when it came to remembering passwords. I defended myself weakly and tried to make out I was the paragon of competency. 

So why was this week bad?

Well trying to reinstall everything takes time and then you realise you’ve forgotten the password that had been crafted for easy memory way back when. If you change it then what should it be? A modification of the password perhaps, or something similar? 

Of course this makes matters worse because variations make it complicated. A capital letter here, a set of numbers there and maybe a symbol chucked in. Usually you see a line that says STRONG or WEAK. We all aim for strong of course which means the darn password becomes ever more difficult to recall. But, it was not just passwords that made my week a melt down.  It was my pride and joy. MY WORKHORSE. MY LAPTOP. 

Now 4 years old I would turn it on for an early morning start. Mid sentence the wretched screen goes black. This had been slowly escalating for the last few weeks. Note to self yo contact Apple. 

It’s easy to put off tasks until another day, which of course I had done. Life is too hectic, too busy and too much to do to spend an hour on the phone to a help desk. Anyway I finally took the leap and made the call. I use Apple because their service is friendly. When I say friendly you can be stupid and say stupid things and they just act professionally and helpful. They do not make you feel the klutz that you know you are. I am quite good at finding the serial number now and can even tell them what Make my laptop is. I was, on this occasion, waiting to know what the diagnosis was, the prognosis of course, and the damage in terms of pound notes!

There was a pause and the helpful man came back. It’s always first names now so. 

“Well David, I’ve just checked and your MacBook Pro is due for a recall.” This news was met with my mind thinking, 

“Oh no, that means my baby is off to the Mac Hospital! How am I going to cope?”  Not, “Oh great it’s free.”

I was offered 2 options. (1) Collect and send in by mail drop or (2) go to a centre. I elected the first which meant staying safe, protecting the NHS and such stuff. Yep I am still a responsible human. Quick check by the nice man. 

“Ah, sorry David, your postal address does not allow a collection you will have to go to a centre.” 

As my phone had now more or less been updated after the loss of all the various attachments (my daughter should be proud), the nice man from Apple guided me with the requisite booking App. Hey presto, 4 days the APP said, and I could take my treasured possession to the store and hand it in. What could be easier? But, how long would it leave me stranded for?

Now ask yourself this. You use your computer to write and turn out 1500 – 3500 words daily and keep a website going and write articles and have a webinar to prepare. How do you cope? I used my diary log that night and wrote a pitiful entry using the choicest of four letter words and screamed in print and generally misbehaved on screen.  Even I thought better of putting this on Social Media and so you only have the cleaned up version.

I dusted off my old Mac Pro, which I would say is at least 10 years old, and willed it to work. This has old software and some things just don’t work that well. Oh and boy does it take a long time to warm up? We use to call it boot up, but I’m not sure. Maybe my knowledgeable daughter could help here.

This old girl (or is it a boy, or gender neutral) has an old DVD slot which comes in handy to watch those bygone methods of video playing. Usually reader I do stream my films these days. I’m not a total anachronist.

No. I haven’t finished!

Can I brag a bit? I have a seriously fast broadband. It’s fibre to the house and we were lucky at the start of the year to change from what can only be described as changing from tortoise to a hare. Even that would be unfair to tortoises as the speed was really slug-like. 1Mb/sec shot to 240+Mb/sec on a bad day. Anyway the DVD slot on this old machine comes in handy when abroad and wanted to watch a film. This was when flights were popular and death and stuff didn’t happen! Anyway, back to my current problem…

I did 5 days’ work in three and had the old thing working again liking starting up a vintage car. Yes some hair came out I confess in the process. 

I took my prized possession to the elected centre 30 miles away. First my temperature was taken and the nice man (they’re always nice) ask me some questions. I handled all of this quite well.  At least I got my name right. He checked. How do you spell that? My heart sunk, then he said I was early.

“Ah yes. You’ve come in for your i-phone!”

I’m sure I dropped a heart beat. My riposte almost sounded pleading. 

“No it’s the MacBook Pro.”

“Who booked it?” He snapped back.

“Well we did,” I pointed out. I couldn’t have done this without help.

Then the nice lady came (they’re always nice). The explanation went something like this. 

“Well we don’t have an engineer for this sort of thing today so you may have a long wait, but if you stay here (which was outside the shop under a canopy) I will do my best.”

A voice inside me said – “don’t shoot the messenger!”

I phoned my wife who was in a neighbouring store with my debit card. I was keen to get back to her for reasons I won’t go into.

The nice lady must have called down to the original man, who I had not mentioned was built like a club bouncer. Did Apple stores expect trouble?

I followed the unidirectional arrows into the store. There were a few people milling around but the human traffic was being strictly monitored. Another nice man called Sam greeted me. I smiled at him although he could not see my face as I was of course wearing a mask. It could not have gone smoother and in the time it takes to sneeze I was back out and heading for the shoe store where my wife had not been tempted to buy more than one pair of shoes. 

My laptop would take 10 days or so and now it was back to work on my old machine. That was Thursday and now I write Saturday. 

I needed to do some editing and clean up some of my webpages. Half way through an article the server went down. I contacted my Webmaster at around 8.30am as I normally start early. The e-mail went through. There was nothing I could do about the website while I waited. Then the cat had just threatened to honk her food up all over the floor. I threw her out as I was in no mood to clean the floor of the sickly brown porridge looking stuff she can project.

I went to the search bar and typed in something else and nothing. I checked my phone, nothing. I checked my i-pad, nothing. I checked the modem. The light was red. I HAD NO INTERNET.  I screamed at the technology!

You know it doesn’t matter how fast your broadband is, if it stops working, even the best leaves nothing as a reserve. Not even a bitsy 1MB.  Suddenly it dawned on me I needed to contact BT and did not have their number. To find details your needed the Internet and of course I could contact them using their webpage. I did not have Internet access so it meant trying another tack. 

A need to get away

Last week our holiday to North America hit the dust. We both needed to get away. Leaving home and having no Internet was not an option to return to. Phoning from the car I obtained a suitable contact which informed me…

“Owing to larger than usual volumes there is a 30 minute wait.” I had gone through all of the usual buttons to reach this point. I was reminded I could contact BT using the Internet.

Now there is one problem with mobile phones. That is that their signal can soon disappear down the type of roads where we live. Hills, road dips and dense woodlands are the norm in this part of our rural world. I dreaded a drop out when I would have to start all over again.

One hour later and connecting to an engineer this time, after an equally long second wait, my wife had taken over the phone as I was driving. Of course being in her car I had not re-Blue-toothed the i-phone to her car system. Another small issue with the earlier problem previously mentioned about the phone going down. The nice lady on the end of the phone who was speaking for the engineering department wanted a verification code. I had to pull off the road toute de suite and check my message box. 

“Great, you will get a new temporary modem to me yes. An engineer will be with you Monday”.

“But I’m going away!” I explained, hoping pitifully for something to happen today.

We forget in this new age our lives are now controlled by those little gadgets with their breathtaking computing power. The only saving grace is that tomorrow we look forward to a well earned break which has been six months coming.  My website server is back up again at least and by 28th September my latest AUTUMN NEWSFEED will be available for those signed-up. At least there will be one reader of that I’m sure, but in case you are wondering, all this effort is for you reader. One likes to go the extra mile and damn the consequences!

Post-script

Great holiday. All fixed now. Apple turned around my computer in 4 days and BT sorted the internet whilst I was away. I have my life back as much as we know it! Armageddon over, now it’s only Brexit the concluding story ahead of us and threats of a further Lockdown. What could be more simple?