Plug me in

I can state, without fear of contradiction, that my expertise at my desktop computer can at best be described as passable. The same goes for my mobile phone. The latter contains a wealth of goodies which, for the most part I loftily ignore. A spot of messaging, checking out what the stock markets are doing, ongoing cricket or tennis scores and occasionally, particularly if I am in a car (not driving) or waiting at the airport or at the dentist’s, scanning for anything interesting on YouTube. That would be the sum and substance of my mobile phone indulgence.

Nowadays, I strictly avoid scrolling through the mind-boggling variety of news items that some of the celebrated search engines offer. The head honcho of India’s leading IT giant or Bollywood heartthrob Shah Rukh Khan or former cricketing hero Sachin Tendulkar, will appear on screen imploring me to park Rs.5000/- in some ponzi scheme that very morning (it has to be that very morning or the opportunity goes abegging), guaranteeing the while that I shall be richer to the tune of Rs. 1.75 lakhs by the same evening! For variety, I will also be informed that Clint ‘Dirty Harry’ Eastwood has just passed away (he is in his 90s), Eric Clapton and Dustin Hoffman are in critical care (hospital photos provided) and that Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon and Sting will be doing a 31-city tour of the world with A.R. Rahman joining them in Mumbai and Bangalore. All fakes, or fibs as we used to say in school.

I do spend a great deal more time on my desktop. As a retired professional spending most of my sunset years at home, the desktop provides me with the luxury of sitting back and writing blogs (like this one) and crafting mails to friends, taking care to ensure that the apostrophes and punctuations are properly placed – a virtually impossible task on your mobile phone, where one is literally all thumbs. Having said that, it is not all a bed of roses with my desktop either. Let me elaborate.

The thing is my desktop computer, nice wide screen notwithstanding, is umbilically connected to my printing device. To employ an au courant computer-speak, they ‘talk to each other.’ So, when I fish out a document from one of my many digital files and wish to print the same, I issue a print command. The printer then proceeds to make a variety of strange sounds from the innards of its bowels, all manner of little lights flashing the while, and when all the fuss is over, the sheet of paper finally starts to slowly slide out of the printer. If you are lucky, the document comes out printed perfectly well and the computer makes another final, unintelligible clearing of its throat, as if to say, ‘What a good boy am I!’ However, things don’t always go to plan.

The computer and the printer may have taken the sacred vows of matrimony, but the course of true love does not always run smooth. Those little flashing lights on the printer I just mentioned, all is hunky-dory as long as the lights are blinking green. The moment the red lights come on, trouble is afoot. Either the paper is jammed good and proper, or the printing ink (black and white or colour) has run dry and worst of all, the much-touted nuptials between the printer and the desktop has sprung a leak. Usually, with an uncanny sense of poor timing, this crisis will come upon me or, God-help-me, my better half, just when she is putting the finishing touches to our income-tax-returns. By then, she has become my bitter half! Yes, I freely admit, it is she who takes care of the mind-numbing number crunching. I contribute to the effort by turning the A4 paper over on the printer, page after page. Always assuming the printer and my computer, are playing ball. I came across this quote by American columnist Dave Barry which hits the nail squarely on the head, ‘A printer consists of three main parts: the case, the jammed paper tray and the blinking red light.’

It is not as if the desktop needs the printer to goad it into a serious error of its ways. It is perfectly capable of finding ingenious ways to make my life a hell on earth. Without so much as a by-your-leave, the vowels A and O will, on tapping the keys, become permanently depressed, never to rise again. They will flatly refuse to come out of their depression, putting paid to any further progress on my part to construct that perfect sentence we scriveners strive for. Their depression immediately leads to my depression. How will you feel if your final effort looked like this?  ‘D vid l id l w the mighty G li th.’ Pretty depressed, like A and O, I should imagine. Burn another 6k to buy a new keyboard.

Once in a proverbial blue moon, I will call up one of these IT nerds who, for a not-so-modest fee, will moonlight to come and help poor sods like me when we get irretrievably stuck in some technical glitch. To give them credit, they solve the problem, more often than not. While the nerd is at work, I watch him in sheer amazement and wonder. He operates at the speed of lightning. Every now and then he will stop to take a call on his ear-plugged mobile and utter some unintelligible gobbledegook to a fellow nerd in a lingo only the two of them can follow. Meanwhile, all kinds of images, graphs, numbers, sounds and colours flash on the screen. Does my desktop contain all this stuff, I ask him? What do I know, who only Microsoft Word and Excel know, I ask myself? He does not respond to any of my asinine queries and continues to work at a feverish pace. Must be getting late for another appointment. Another ten minutes of tapping and scrolling, and the nerd’s work is done. ‘Rs.1200/- Sir. UPI Sir, if you don’t mind.’ Making digital payments, fortunately, is within my ambit of competence, so I pay up without demur, but I am not finished with him yet.

‘One question before you go, young man. Thank you very much for taking care of the problem but can you, in layman’s terms, explain how you solved the issue? That way, I can take care of it myself if this problem crops up again.’

He replied patiently, if a wee bit condescendingly. ‘Sorry Sir, I have to rush for a meeting. It will take long to explain and you will not understand. If you face this problem again, which I doubt very much, just call me and I will be with you in a jiffy.’

And doubtless make another quick 1200 chips while you are at it, I thought to myself. I guess I should be grateful and not be quite so mordant. The chap knew his computer onions and I should not begrudge him making a quick buck on the side. Even if he had spent another hour explaining the workings of my machine and how to trouble-shoot, I should have been completely non-plussed. Having come to grips with reality, I get back to my desktop, send up a silent prayer, and proceed with my half-completed blog. Right then, let’s get this show on the road. What did the blighter say? Press Alt and Ctrl simultaneously, then press Shift and finally tap Enter. Or something that sounded vaguely like that. Bloody hell! I did all that and the whole page has been deleted. Every precious word. I should have written it all down, but the nerd was in such a tearing hurry.

At the end of the day, I could do a lot worse than follow the dictates of my favourite humourist, P.G. Wodehouse who said, when he was stuck for an idea or when the ribbon on his Remington ran out of ink, ‘I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit.’