Friday, February 08, 2019

Reasonable IT

I understand that there are some IT problems. All across the world, with real and digital consequences. Everything has been switch off and on again. I also checked the date. Dates are important, if you happen to get the date wrong then you're stuck with the wrong date and that just doesn't work. But it wasn't the date. Did I say there were IT problems all across the world? I did but I really just meant with me, on my laptop. The laptop I use for work. Other people's IT problems are theirs and I'm eager not to become involved. So mine has a fault. I blamed the touch screen, I never did trust that, so I cleaned it. Then I cleaned it again between switching things off and on. Then I touched the screen in different places, just to test, just to understand the consequences. Nothing changed, I still couldn't/can't access the bit that I can normally access but can't now access. I tried the touch screen using a stylus instead of fingers. It was very accurate. I looked for key-stroke short cuts. I looked at the IT helpline number on the list of useful numbers. That was tempting but would involve a phone call, a wait and then retrying the things I'd tried. Then the cat started clawing me. Purring and clawing at my thigh. The rain fell and turned into water where it landed. Then I had an idea. Maybe I didn't really save yesterday's work? Maybe I didn't even enter it? Maybe the things that I though I had done I didn't actually do and so when I touch the touch screen and it opens in the wrong place it's because it's the correct place because I didn't do what I thought I did. That was possible I thought. I need to retrace my steps. A step at a time. At first I took baby steps, retrieved data. The papers are in the car, I just put them there when the rain stopped, to save time I thought. Now there's rain but I'll have to get those papers. I got the papers. Reentered a date. Yesterday. Checked dates. Turns out that dates matter and it turns out that if you don't complete what you did on the day, on the day then the day disappears and you have to start again but there's no warning of this. It all just disappears. Apart from the stuff that was elsewhere (elsewhere is an important place), it somehow isn't lost it's just "elsewhere" (a place that eventually ties up  nicely with places that are not elsewhere but I can't explain that). So I recreated the past using archive and elsewhere and ended up somewhere and the touch screen suddenly yielded to my painful, plaintive prods and the lost and invisible became slowly visible and for a short while I was happy as I uploaded my work and the integrity and accuracy of it all seemed, well, reasonable. Pretty reasonable. We have reasonable IT. 

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