I HAVE been as flat out as the proverbial lizard drinking.
And on rare occasions I have felt about as useful as a hip pocket on my singlet.
But never have I been as bereft as when having no grandchild within reach.
This forced me the other day, while in the cattle yards on my own, to dial our provider for IT support because there was a problem with the computer.
Any other time and I would get one of the young ‘uns to fix the problem.
It gets done with a minimum of fuss – beyond their little sniggers about poor old Whacker and what a dinosaur he is.
So there I was, on the phone in the shed, a wand in one hand and a computer on the bench in the yards, and neither speaking to the other.
Then again, I wasn’t speaking to anyone either.
As valuable as my call was to the provider – this nice lady kept telling me so, over and over – I also had the option of leaving my name and number as they “were experiencing an unusually heavy number of calls” and someone would get back to me as soon as possible.
Now I have been caught out by that one before. It took the company in question so long to call me back I had forgotten what I wanted in the first place.
This time I was going to wait them out and make a human talk me through my problem – come hell or high water.
About 27 minutes later, give or take a curse, I got my human, who took me through all sorts of protocols before discovering I was not the account holder.
“I am very sorry sir (it’s hard to do a foreign accent in type, but I am sure you get the picture),” this cheery chap intoned.
“But we can only talk to the account holder. Is Mr Whacker Jr there and we can get him to authorise you for the purposes of this call.”
I covered the phone while dispensing a few more words of wisdom that had the steers backing up on the far side of the yard.
Then I picked it up again and said I was Whacker Jr and it would be OK for Whacker Sr to manage this call.
To which the happy chap on the other end said OK and away we went.
Farce is too polite a word. I mean, it’s all so pointless and yet they all sound so sincere and concerned about it.
My little whiz bang on the phone now had me pulling up things I had never seen before on the computer screen, making a tweak here and a twist there.
We checked incoming and outgoing servers, we checked provider linkages and codes, we went into just about every option on the start button and he sat there somewhere in cyber space (but not Australia) and kept clicking his tongue as plan after plan failed to fix the problem.
And just when I thought he had given me up for lost he had one of those light bulb moments.
“Let’s try this,” he almost pleaded.
“Switch your computer off, disconnect the power source, wait 30 seconds, reconnect the power and switch it back on.”
Which I duly did … and it did the trick.
At this point words failed me – and you know how often that happens.
Had this guy spent years at university to learn how to turn a computer on and off?
All this technology, hanging on the phone all that time, too much time wasted when I could have been measuring cattle, and going through countless remedies and being assured each one would get me right.
Switch it off. What a crock. So I hung up before I suggested where he could get off.
The steers, however, had to hear it all.
