spending | quercuscommunity

We’ll do the palindrome first. Sadly for all my American readers the 20th November isn’t a palindrome, so I’m afraid you are going to feel let down and lied to. However, I suppose you’ve become used to that over the years. I know that I have, and it looks like it will get worse. I was listening to some sort of academic on the news tonight and he said that the confidence rating in the UK Government had been at 75% until the Cummings Affair, after which it dropped drastically and continued to slide to around 30%.

However, I digress. Today, I enjoyed writing 20.11.20 on the slips with the parcels, all thirteen of them. I have sent parcels to Spain (2), Canada, Australia and Japan. I even sent one to Scotland and one to the 19th Century. Or Somerset, as it is known to the Royal Mail.

Several parcels had multiple items, and several of the items had, whilst waiting to be sold, managed to move around and had the be flushed out of cover.

Someone rang in with a telephone order just after lunch (as previously arranged by email) and things became a little trickier due to an equipment failure. It seems that if you leave a card terminal dormant long enough you have to reset it. We haven’t used for two weeks in lockdown, so, of course, it refused the payment and it took me twenty minutes to sort out before ringing the customer back to complete the sale.

The Minor Disaster relates to the ancient computer. It has been slowly crumbling and slowing down, and it is now making terrible grinding noises. On top of that it only works for ten to fifteen minutes before locking up and taking half an hour to close down.

I am now £379 poorer and will be picking up the new computer tomorrow night. There will be advantages, of course, like being able to use photographs again, but I will be having a few moments alone with my wallet to remember the cash and shed a few tears.

I’m using the netbook at the moment, and will struggle on for a few days. After all, it’s not like I’m just going to plug it in and start. It’s never that easy…

It’s been a strange Sunday. Julia’s laptop has been playing up and refusing to connect to the internet so we went to the computer shop where they told us it would cost £60 to have it sent away, after which they would tell us how much it would cost before we could get it back. Forgive my cynicism but that seems to me to be a good description of how kidnappers operate.

That’s how I ended up looking round Curry’s/PC World looking at new laptops.

It’s also how I ended up sitting in the car whimpering. It’s been an expensive couple of weeks, and the process of spending money

I’m sure it must be possible, bearing in mind the advance of technology and the economics of mass production, to build an acceptable laptop for around £150. We don’t need a terrabyte of memory or the ability to use huge amounts of graphics. We just want to write emails. surf the net and brighten up a few photos.

That’s before I even start on the evils of the new way of selling Microsoft Office. If you own a copy and haven’t replaced your computer in the last few years you’re in for a surprise. You don’t own it now, you just rent it for a year at a time. When your subscription expires you don’t have access to Office.

That’s like buying a car and only renting the ignition key.

After that I had to go to the park and photograph birds.