Anyone over about the age of 50 reading this title probably won’t thank me for it. I’ve given you an earworm and if I’m doing my job right, you’ll be going around all day singing what you can remember of the lyrics (see below).
“Whatever happened to all the heroes?
All the Shakespearoes?
Ner ner ner ner ner ner
Something something, dooby doo
Whatever happened to the heroes?
No more heroes anymore
No more heroes anymore”
And so on and so forth. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, please visit YouTube (other platforms are available) and look up The Stranglers, No More Heroes. That should explain it.
So let’s get to the point of this blog, which is technology, and how much I hate it and it hates me.
Simple elements of modern life, which everyone else takes for granted, pass the Leigh household by. Suffolk isn’t known for its fast internet speeds, and that’s fine. If I wanted super-duper all-singing all-dancing full-fat broadband I’d have stayed in Essex. However, even by the county’s standards, out here it’s lamentable. It drops out at least twice a week. Even when we upgraded to the Very Posh Router it still disappeared from time to time, waiting until I was up against a deadline and then deciding to go off and do something else.
We get our TV signal from the tower at Stowmarket. At about 10.00 every night, whoever is in charge goes off for a nice cup of tea and presses a switch which means that Mr Leigh and I myself, relaxing on the sofa for some much-needed iPlayer time, are faced with the endless Circle of Doom. We usually give up and go to bed.
A few weeks ago, I was driving down the lane when I spotted a BT engineer doing something to our box of phone wires (not its real name). As I watched, he took a shovelful of coal from a small portable bunker and threw it into the box. Sparks flew. Presumably, our broadband got a bit quicker. Send more coal, BT!
Full-time writer
I became a full-time writer on 1st January this year with my very own Palace of Creativity in which to write. Naturally, even the Very Posh Router doesn’t manage to send our feeble Wi-Fi signals as far as the Palace, which is situated right next door to the house. I rang our broadband provider and a twelve-year-old boy answered. The conversation went something like this.
Me: Hi. I need to make the internet work in my writing studio. I’ve upgraded to the Very Posh Router but it’s not making any difference.
Twelve-year-old boy: Ah, yes. That’s because the gamma rays are bouncing off the walls of the house. They don’t like walls. I’ve checked your postcode and you need to be stoking your box of phone wires with coal on the hour, every hour.
Me: OK. I didn’t understand any of that. I just want to have internet in my studio. Surely you can make that happen.
Twelve-year-old boy (stifling sigh): The only other thing you can do is get some eeros.
Me: What?
Twelve-year-old boy: Eeros. They extend the Wi-Fi signal from your router. That’ll probably work. Mind you, it might not. You’d need three, at least.
Me (by now exasperated): Yes! I’ll take three. Please send them immediately.
Twelve-year-old boy: I’ll put them on order. They’re very simple to install but if you have any problems, please ring our helpline.
A week or two before Christmas, a large brown box arrived. My husband eyed it with suspicion and when I explained that it contained eeros, he immediately began making jokes about Miniature Eeros (the chocolates) while I sang No More Heroes. We made a cup of tea and agreed that we’d look into installing them tomorrow.
Which never came. Because we are afraid of all technology. As I mentioned, it hates us. Yesterday, I took the bull by the horns, ripped open the box and took out a selection of white boxes, leads and plugs, with a wafer-thin instruction manual in a number of languages explaining how laughably simple installing the darn things was going to be.
Dear reader, between us, Mr Leigh and I are 110. England last won the World Cup the year we were born. We’re not meant to be installing apps and waiting for the blinking blue light to go solid. It took us all afternoon, but we did it before it was school pick-up time. Had we applied to our teenagers, they would have sighed patiently and done the whole thing in seconds. We were inordinately proud of ourselves. This is the second blog I’ve written in the Palace. It feels good.
Maybe that twelve-year-old boy was a bit of a Miniature Eero himself.