The Spaghetti Room

As I've said before, my first computer was a hand-me-down from my geeky brother Rob (or, as I affectionately call him - "Slob", or "Robert the Slobbert").  Slob loves his computers, although now he has apparently 'seen the light' and become an official and die hard Mac user and an all things Windows disser.  But back then, his computer parts were his babies, and he lovingly put the bits and pieces together and fiddled about with them for hours, crooning at them lovingly, feeding them regularly, changing their poopy nappies, swearing at them occasionally if they didn't do what they were told... generally devoting all his spare time with them.  So you can rest assured, if I managed to get one of his hand-me-downs, it was well and truely a dinosaur and a piece of shit if he was willing to give it up from his collection.

It was, if I remember correctly, a '286', which basically made a loud whirring noise and very slowly acted like a word processor.  That's really all I used it for, until I got the internet.

The 286 used to sit squatly on a big computer desk in the living room, waiting there menacingly for me to try and use it, and it regularly mucked up.  (It wasn't my fault - I swear!).  Luckily for clueless wonders like me, it had a very easily accessible reset button which was my absolute lifeline.  That button was worn smooth, and in the event that even that didn't work, I'd place a nervous, angst filled phone call to Slob all the way over the other side of the world (he moved to Scotland) to ask him what I did next to fix it.  I was terrified of computers then - they were mysterious, expensive but essential pieces of equipment, and I knew that computer technicians cost an arm and a leg to fix them.  Because I was rather attached to my arms and legs, I didn't want to pay the exorbitant prices to get an expert to fix it, and so I paid the exorbitant phone bill filled with calls to Scotland instead.

Fast forward 18 years, and walk into our living room and you'll find a family of geeks sitting on the sofas, all with a laptop on their laps.   I have since become computer savy and can tame the savage beasts with a whip and a chair, and maybe a screwdriver and another internet connection so I can google what the hell is going wrong and how to fix it.  We sit here on our wondrous wireless laptops, the girls madly playing 'Horse Isle' (which they pronounce horse 'izel') and me and Ben doing our various internet businessy things. 

I said 'wireless', and I meant the internet - wireless routers are a gift from the heavens.  But the heavens still haven't seen fit to gift us with laptops which have everlasting batteries, and so we have a living room which looks like it is carpeted with thick black spaghetti, or maybe very thin snakes which have swallowed rectangular power boxes.  We are always tripping over them, and the power cables only lasted about a year and a half before the connections which go into the laptop itself started to come apart.  Ben regularly gets his soldering iron out to patch our dodgy wires.  I have ordered another cable from ebay (official HP ones cost 6 times as much - like hell I'm paying that much!) and am regularly peering out the window in the hopes that today is the day the postie will be coming up the drive with my package.

If any great inventor happens to stumble upon this small, humble blog, please heed my plea - invent a laptop battery which lasts forever so we can banish the spaghetti from our living room for good!  Put the invention of a cordless laptop up there with the necessity of finding a solution to making a solar powered cars and a cure for cancer.  Us geeks will be eternally grateful.