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"Breaking Things" Day
May. 29th, 2007 03:31 pmMy first Memorial Day weekend in America was spent alone, indoors hiding from the volcanic heat outside, with a giant fan next to my desk. I'd previously asked what the holiday was about and nobody seemed to be able to remember, though it seems to be roughly equivalent to Remembrance Day in Britain (ironically enough). The long weekend passed very quickly as I tried not to think about "working" on the various projects that I have going at the moment, instead going on TV Links (which I'm absolutely addicted to now - more on that at a later date) and occasionally getting up to cook something.
The worst bit of it is that now that Whitney's out of the house, everything electronic has decided to turn on me at once. It's like what happens at my parent's house when I'm not around to fix things. The problems started exactly at the beginning of the weekend, when I got up to leave work and my space bar fell off. And as it's on a laptop, trying to put it back on is a fiddly task normally never seen outside an Angry Man sketch from Chewin' the Fat. There are two little plastic hooks that have to lock in to each other, a task only made possible by pulling the outer one apart with your teeth and one hand to get the millimetre of room required to slot the other one in between it with your other hand. And then it all has to be hooked on to the base of the keyboard, hit down until it stays, and the key replaced on top of them, hoping that they'll all fit together again. And it's almost worked - the space bar now produces a space as long as I don't hit the very edge of it with my right thumb. Which, coincidentally, is exactly the place that I've ingrained my brain into hitting it on my old desktop keyboard because none of the rest of it worked.
The next problem was the suicide of the oven. And I use that word very carefully. I got home on Friday night to find that it had been beeping insistently for any time up to most of the day, and it wouldn't stop no matter how many times I cancelled its meaningless "F7" error code. I found out later in the weekend that the "bake" and "broil" buttons were stuck, and the oven was continually trying to turn itself on at immense heat, giving the error as a safeguard. This is quite hurtful in a way - does it not seem to you that the oven was actively trying to kill itself rather than be used by me ever again?
My phone is another thing that's broken recently. That is, it still works - I can talk to people over it, and that's all I require of a phone. I noticed that the speakerphone had stopped working the other week, but I didn't see that as a massive problem. Now it's given up ringing - or, as I pointed out to Whitney, "It doesn't ring. It's not that I'm not listening to it, it's on the desk here in front of me, it doesn't make a sound when you call me. I don't need to change the volume, my volume is fine, it doesn't ring. It's right next to me, nothing happened to it, it doesn't ring, its ring isn't working, it does not ring." Just to make that clear. But it always seems to work when she previously warns me that she's about to call over IM, so it's clearly evil as well as insane.
And the Dave Gorman book I ordered from Amazon about a week and a half ago still hasn't arrived. This isn't a huge problem in itself because I still have a good fifty pages of Jeremy Clarkson shouting about foreigners to keep me going on the train, but I'm starting to wonder where it's gone.
The worst bit of it is that now that Whitney's out of the house, everything electronic has decided to turn on me at once. It's like what happens at my parent's house when I'm not around to fix things. The problems started exactly at the beginning of the weekend, when I got up to leave work and my space bar fell off. And as it's on a laptop, trying to put it back on is a fiddly task normally never seen outside an Angry Man sketch from Chewin' the Fat. There are two little plastic hooks that have to lock in to each other, a task only made possible by pulling the outer one apart with your teeth and one hand to get the millimetre of room required to slot the other one in between it with your other hand. And then it all has to be hooked on to the base of the keyboard, hit down until it stays, and the key replaced on top of them, hoping that they'll all fit together again. And it's almost worked - the space bar now produces a space as long as I don't hit the very edge of it with my right thumb. Which, coincidentally, is exactly the place that I've ingrained my brain into hitting it on my old desktop keyboard because none of the rest of it worked.
The next problem was the suicide of the oven. And I use that word very carefully. I got home on Friday night to find that it had been beeping insistently for any time up to most of the day, and it wouldn't stop no matter how many times I cancelled its meaningless "F7" error code. I found out later in the weekend that the "bake" and "broil" buttons were stuck, and the oven was continually trying to turn itself on at immense heat, giving the error as a safeguard. This is quite hurtful in a way - does it not seem to you that the oven was actively trying to kill itself rather than be used by me ever again?
My phone is another thing that's broken recently. That is, it still works - I can talk to people over it, and that's all I require of a phone. I noticed that the speakerphone had stopped working the other week, but I didn't see that as a massive problem. Now it's given up ringing - or, as I pointed out to Whitney, "It doesn't ring. It's not that I'm not listening to it, it's on the desk here in front of me, it doesn't make a sound when you call me. I don't need to change the volume, my volume is fine, it doesn't ring. It's right next to me, nothing happened to it, it doesn't ring, its ring isn't working, it does not ring." Just to make that clear. But it always seems to work when she previously warns me that she's about to call over IM, so it's clearly evil as well as insane.
And the Dave Gorman book I ordered from Amazon about a week and a half ago still hasn't arrived. This isn't a huge problem in itself because I still have a good fifty pages of Jeremy Clarkson shouting about foreigners to keep me going on the train, but I'm starting to wonder where it's gone.
