Friday, June 23, 2006

The Age Of No Technology

Last week Monday, my housemate who owns the TV moved out and left us with a big blank space where our TV used to be... (actually, a reasonably small space, but that doesn't sound as dramatic) I did not mind too much as I still had the internet, dvds and the radio to entertain myself with. Or at least, that's what I thought.
Until last weekend when our internet stoppped working. Not because anything was wrong with it, but because the mother of one of my housemates, who pays our broadband on her credit card, cancelled everything on said credit card because it got broken into.
Living without TV (which is not that big a problem for me) and internet has proved quite difficult: I can no longer chat to people on msn, read my email every day, read and write blogs as often as I want, look up actors I fancy on Imdb, or play Quickstack, which I was getting quite addicted to, or do my daily crossword (yes, I am an old lady, so sue me!).
But I still have the comforts of my trusty mobile (which is running out of credit and I am broke), the radio and my laptop to watch DVDs on. I would say I have books to read too, but they are all in boxes ready to be stored for the summer, and as they are extremely expertly packed I dare not open the boxes and mess with the system (all hail Leni, queen of packing books).
Again, this assumption turned out to be wrong. My stereo seems to not want to give me a nice clear radio signal, which means I either have to listen to Radio 2 with lots of static and the occasional outburst of Spanish, or listen to my CDs all day. Which are, hm, packed. And I quite like the radio, because it plays songs I do not know by heart and even Johnny Cash gets a little annoying when you hear the same song over and over and over and over again. (although it pains me to write it down, it is true...)
With nothing left to entertain myself but the DVDs of my one remaining housemate, as I had finished reading the biography of Roald Dahl that has been waiting patiently all term for me to finish work, I settled down with 'Back to Future', one of my favourite films of all times (and my housemate has the trilogy, so I am good for the next two days). While watching the Bonus Material, however, my computer froze!! Nothing worked!! I controlaltdeleted the shit out of it, but nothing happened, so I turned it off and on again, which seemed to make it work, but the whole episode has left me worried.
Am I to live my last remaining week in England in complete solitude, with no contact with the outer world except the people at work?
Is my laptop going to die when it is not even one year old yet?
Isn't it time I started to learn something about technology?
The age of truce between Merel and the machines has ended. War is upon us.

2 comments:

spirito said...

In a world..
(images of burning things and screaming people)
of chaos...
(machines are marching down the street)
one woman...
(focus on shoes walking)
must face the task of not making her laptop explode in the next 2 weeks.

which one moved out?

Queen Mushroom said...

Gary, although now Rob is also gone. I just made the computer at the IT centre do something I did not want it to do.. eeps.