A riveting story of tech

I grew up with computers.

Suffice to say it all started with a very state of the art Commodore Plus4 or +4 or however it was branded. It was my brother who introduced computers into the family. I used it for games and my brother was the programmer type. Obviously I was perhaps 10 or younger at the time. Then came the Commodore Amiga 2000 and then the PCs took over. I was even an intern at an IT company for 2 years and if you needed your harddrive changed, your Windows setup changed or the graphics card, sound card etc. changed I was a good bet. 

I honestly don't know what happened. I got a job in finance and more or less without thinking about it I stopped being interested in it. I guess my job was more interesting because one day I found myself owning a MacBook and what a slippery slope that was.

If you ask my friends who didn't know me as a child or during my intern days, they'd be very surprised that I wasn't a technophobe. Sure, I have a relatively new iMac and I have an iPhone X so I do like new gadgets but when it comes to knowing how to work it they'd say I'm all thumbs.

Ok, thinking back I do know when I seriously stopped caring about how to work all things tech. It was when I bought my first (still works and is my only) flatscreen TV. It was like you needed an engineering degree and a doctorate in flatscreen TV'ing. It's a thing, I'm sure. You can study anything these days. In the end I asked a coworker at the time for the specs he'd get and walked into the Sony Center with a great big SUCKER sign on my forehead and handed the salesman the list. I said "I need that, and it needs to be pretty". I got what I asked for and it's still a lovely TV. Anyway I digress.

Since then it was all downhill. I ask for help from friends followed by this

Marilyn Monroe Not Very Bright GIF from Marilynmonroe GIFs

Then with my job I obviously knew very little about anything that went on there so I had to be able to contribute to something. I reluctantly mentioned my techie past and as coworkers now expect me to know the answers to all things Word, Excel, Windows 10, MS Teams I'm finding that I'm learning by doing. To quote the very fishlike looking fashole CELINE!: It's all coming back to me now.

That was Celine, right? Not Meatloaf? I can never remember. Is Meatloaf still around? I don't know, but I digress.

So I mentioned that I own an iMac. I also own an old Apple Cinema LED extra screen I got for my old MacBook. So you can imagine as I work from home these days my home office desk is crowded as I also have my work HP laptop and as HDMI doesn't play well with an 8 year old Apple Cinema screen I had an old HP monitor packed in there for good measure. I was so frustrated that I had that Apple Cinema that I also couldn't hook up with my iMac because the cords were all funny looking compared to the holes in the back of my iMac.

There you go, the techsavy 'Petra was very techie as he googled and googled and ended up asking the great unwashed of Twitter for help. I was feeling a little down by that point. It's a techie Covid-19 world and I'm just living in it. Someone was nice enough to even send a link to a £12 cable which looked like it was wrong. They insisted and alluded that they were "in the know". So obviously as a desperate tech has-been I clicked on that buy button and the next day the cable arrived. Excellent service I may add.

It was the wrong cable.

I told him, well I didn't. Instead I looked at the description on the torn package and went to the website again (because wow, excellent service) and found a cable thing that was the opposite of what I'd received. I bought it and the next day the cable was in my mailbox. AMAZING SERVICE!

It was the right cable!

The cable was plugged into the back of the iMac and connected to the Apple Cinema and WHOOOPPP! it worked. I'm using it now.

Naturally I went on to think of a cable that would plug the Apple Cinema into my work HP laptop. It's not possible. Apparently. At least not without some outdated gizmo gadget that is allegedly lousy. That's not something 'Petra likes to hear. My desk is crowded, the HP monitor is slow on the update and the graphics pretty bad.

Then last night I was in bed being hot and bothered about this very issue. I don't have the Covid-19 symptoms. Not yet anyway. Until at around 1 am I had to get up and look at the cable to see if it could be plugged into the laptop. It could. It works. So now my desk is a little less crowded.

Obviously on a high at 1am I couldn't sleep so I was a little tired this morning and during the meeting where me and my techsavy self was shining like a pure white diamond I couldn't remember if it was Monday or Tuesday.

Oh, how we laughed. 

That's office humour for you. Hah! As I hung up after the meeting I still wasn't sure if it was Monday or Tuesday or Pancake day.

Perhaps I should have made myself an espresso martini and taken to the sofa. Instead it was laundry and a Nespresso café latté.

So there you go, how have you been?