MY laptop is sick. Something has gone wrong with its fan. This forces me back to picking out one letter at a time. Admittedly my typing is not very professional anyway – I normally use two fingers and my thumb – but one letter at a time seems to make life very difficult somehow. And think about all of the other problems this causes, all of the things that I need, trapped inaccessibly on my laptop’s hard drive. Yesterday morning when I switched on the laptop there was the completely unheralded message ‘Fan error’. Disaster! Laptop fans are not stocked here.
This leads to other things for us to consider. How much of our lives are currently dependent on these small, delicate electronic devices and on the Internet that runs among them? Yes I have a backup, but currently it isn’t helping me.
To return to the ‘one letter at a time’ difficulty. I wonder how far this may affect the way that we think and the way that we express ourselves. Does it make us more concise? or does force us towards simple brevity? It’s too much time and effort to engage in a lengthy and reasoned argument, therefore ….?
And in the other matter, the dependence on machines, I wonder how much productivity is lost to Saint Lucia each time ‘the system is down’?
Deirdre Williams
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