Free Range- The Flying Dutchman
BY RO CAMBRIDGEA lovely young Dutchman visited the house other day to install our new photocopier. He was tall and blonde and smart. And very diplomatic. He ignored the fact that our home office is not a gleaming space populated with water coolers, fancy coffee-making appliances, and matching furniture. He pretended not to notice the electrician’s nightmare of extension cords, dead spiders, and hamster-sized dust balls lurking under the desks. Although he raised a blonde eyebrow at the kluge which is our computer system he didn’t let it faze him. As you’ll know, a kluge is an inelegant solution to an engineering problem resulting in “an ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts, forming a distressing whole”.
The Dutchman calmly loaded software and linked computer and copier wirelessly via the internet. Then he pressed buttons and opened secret flaps in the belly of the beast and explained, in charmingly-accented sound bytes, how it worked. I nodded away like one of those loose-headed dog ornaments you see in cars … and just as mindlessly; I could feel the gears in my head whirring but refusing to engage. Nonetheless the illusion was pretty compelling: our new servant, Konica 34XC21b hummed in the corner of the office, docilely awaiting our every command.
But I swear that at the very moment the Dutchman left the house, a shadow passed over the sun. 34XC21b suddenly looked both baleful and inscrutable. But that was just paranoia, a passing Stephen King moment. It wasn’t the copier that had gone feral. It was the laptops and voice-over-internet telephones. We could now copy to our heart’s content, but not Google, email, or make a phone call.
Naturally, I turned first to string theory for an explanation. Not that String Theory, but a simpler theory developed by my grandmother. It states that all the fibres in a ball of wool are related to each other in a very profound way. Unless the first bit of wool is connected to the last, you can’t knit even a sock. So I first made sure that all malfunctioning appliances were connected to every black box I could find in the office. When this didn’t fix things, I did what all technological primitives do... I went to Dick Smith’s and gabbled wretchedly about whatsits and thingamjigs in the hope that they’d sell me a cheap and easy solution.
It turned out the solution didn’t require a purchase at all. I just had to shift the router and modem to a more central position in the house and – voila! – we and our gadgetry were restored to the 21st century.
The new photocopier continues to behave itself – just as the young Dutchman assured us it would. It prints and scans without a murmur of complaint and miraculously, just before the toner runs out, a courier appears on the doorstep with a new cartridge.
It disappoints in just one regard. I’ve pressed all the buttons but I just can’t get the darn thing to produce a decent latte.