Dec 22

Normally, as technological as we get is the presence of the whistling kettle in the kitchen. Used tonight, by the way, to make a cup of ginger mint green tea. Not the obvious combination, but it’s -14 and getting steadily colder, and the heat of the ginger is welcome. Anyway, we mention this, about the technology of the kettle, because in the past 48 hours everyone’s been forcing us to battle technology.

There’s the usual work stuff, obviously. Our end-user thing needs headers in size eleven but the body of the reports in twelve, so we – yes, really – tell the user-thingummy to set them to 14 and 16 so they will display as 11 and 12. If you get that, go have a biscuit with your tea that you presumably boiled using one of those pod-things with fancy buttons.

Then, last night, we went out to see the new Wallace and Grommit film, wherein, no spoilers, a pice of technology runs amok. Delightfully funny if you live with one of those home assistant things. We did, but do not now. We don’t miss being told our request for the jazz station somehow requires a subscription to YouTube, but only if we want to listen to jazz from Mars while orbiting the solar system of Utopia Limited.

Then, today, after running around to see The Messiah and an aborted effort to decorate the tree, we sat down to write the blog. Up popped a message asking if we wanted to allow the logitech accessory to access our device. Logtichec? Accessory? We only figured out it was asking if we wanted the mouse pluggin we’ve been using since we bought the laptop to access the laptop it already accesses when it became apparent the mouse wasn’t operational. Why wasn’t it opperational? Who knows! It was working last night. It was working this morning. There was no major power outage that we know about.

Personally, we blame Wallace and his gnome-tech.

After finally persuading the computer that the mouse it always uses should most definitely be allowed to continue in use, because who can be doing with trackpads, we went looking for a poem. This was not the one we planned. But it sums up how we feel about anything more advanced than an electric kettle. Top marks to the author.

We Have The Technology
Michael Robbins

By the sparklet of certain ciliates cesium
practices its cricket song.

Am I supposed to be impressed? My smoothie
comes with gps.

Take a left at that crustacean. You—yes, you,
with the crisis Isis eyes.

By Odin’s beard, this is snowier than usual. We can
 always burn the first folio.

Go bug a dandelion. You’ll have
 the elephant of surprise.