/ 21 January 2009

Unplugged in the ‘burbs’

The artisans of the world have got the rest of us by the balls, from plumbers to tilers to electricians.

Ka-twang!

That was the control key being levered off the keyboard with the blunt end of a sosatie stick and ricocheting off the computer monitor.

Twang!

Followed by the shift key.

‘Wang — that’s the enter key. Twang, ka-Twang, ‘wang — a few punctuation keys nearly make orbit. Twa-twang-‘ang-‘ang — L, K, M and N go airborne.

To my left, a toolkit: ear buds, damp cloth, vacuum cleaner, paintbrush, sosatie stick and toothpicks for those hard-to-reach corners. This is me, last Thursday, at some indeterminable time after lunch.

The day started with bleary eyes set on tackling this month’s deadlines. But it soon transmogrified into a domestic blitzkrieg, courtesy of a burnt-out electrical cable in the ceiling above my office. It’s some relief to learn that the faulty wiring didn’t burn the house down, but rather chose to plunge me into the dark ages. No lights, no computer. Worse still, not even a cup of tea.

By 2pm (and with the freezer now bleeding perilously on to the kitchen floor) I’d sifted through a year’s strata of unsorted paperwork (is that a press-dried Christmas beetle from ’07?), filed them away (into the bin; the ”2008” folder; some into the ”Urgent!” pile to be ignored for another year), swept up fossilised dust from the far corner of the office and rediscovered parts of my desk that I’d forgotten were there.

Clutter-free, a single blight remained on the newly landscaped desk. The keyboard.

Let me assure you, I hadn’t planned to start 2009 by discovering new species in the ecosystem that is evolving in the shade of the artificial trees, the keys, which sprout out of this sheet of plastic in front of me. But I dare any of you to explore this strange new world. Go ahead, pop off those keys and behold the wonders of keyboard dandruff (that’s geek-speak for the stuff that gathers in the hollows and depressions of a keyboard).

But when one has time on one’s hands — tum-tee-tum.

What, I hear you ask, was I doing about the burnt-out cable, while all this cleaning was going on? I was waiting.

First the private electrician is called in. He pokes about, sucks through his teeth at the sight of the ancient electricity distribution board and calls in the council technicians.

But the electrician leaves a ream of instructions about exactly what they need to check on the outside of the property before he can finish his diagnostics on the inside.

As luck would have it, when the posse of technicians finally arrives two hours later (noon, by now), the nuances of these instructions haven’t made it all the way through from switchboard and council depot. So, within five minutes, the technicians are disappearing smugly in a thunder of diesel engine, having checked the wrong thing (I’d love to tell you exactly what they were supposed to check, but I’m utterly illiterate when it comes to the electrician’s lexicon, so I’d be making it up if I tried).

Several phone calls later and I’ve managed to get the switchboard to tell the technicians that they need to come back. Pointing out that they didn’t do what they were supposed to doesn’t endear me to them much, which is probably why I have to wait another four hours for them to not return. By 5pm a second team comes in. Followed by a third at 8pm, this time with two engineers.

The council guys mutter that the electrician doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The electrician returns the love. Both parties use much stronger language than this, though, and deliver it in deliberate stage whispers for my benefit.

So, bound to my unplugged home (between 10am and 8pm, I didn’t know whether the next crew would arrive in five minutes or five hours, so I couldn’t go anywhere), there was only one thing left to do: clean.

I learned three things that day. One: council needs to rethink its communication channels which are, frankly, a series of broken telephones punctuated by the occasional ”wet-wear” (that’s geek-speak for ”humans”). Two: the artisans of the world have got the rest of us by the balls (without them to plumb our drains, tile our roofs and wire us up to the grid, we’d be knee-deep in shit, being dripped on in the dark). Three: sans electricity, we’re back in the pre-Gutenberg.

Something else I can now announce with a fair degree of confidence: cleaning a keyboard is only marginally more exciting than watching paint dry, which is why I gave up when I got to the A-S-D-F line of keys. Still, here I am, typing this column on the cleanest dog-damned keyboard you’ve every seen. Well, half of it is. The rest of it — maybe that’s a job for this time next year.