A Pipe and a Keyboard

I had a chat with a friend this morning.

He lives 8,000 miles away, and I have never met him in person, but we chat, and occasionally link up using video, so that’s the next best thing.

He has recently been made redundant and is now desperately seeking work.  On the other hand, here am I doing my best to avoid it. 

When I left college back in the late 60s, I hadn’t a clue what was to come next.  I picked up the phone directory, selected six companies more or less at random, and I wrote to them.

The first company to reply gave me an interview straight away, and I got the job.  A week later, another of the six replied, so I did an interview there too.  I got that, so I got myself sacked from the first company after two weeks, and started in the next on the following Monday at double the salary.

I stayed with them for a couple of years and then applied for a job in RTE.  I got that so moved in there.

I was with RTE for the best part of thirty years.

I did manage to get myself sacked there too, when I called the boss a fucking wanker and a total waste of space.  I was reinstated half an hour later by his manager who agreed that he was a fucking wanker and a total waste of space.

I left RTE in 2001 and started my own business, which did very well.  The only problem now is that I’m getting too old for that game and would like to get out of it.  I want to retire properly, and take up writing or something.  But the business is harder to kill that I expected.

So here I am, doing my best to get out of work, and I get talking to someone who is looking for work.  Unfortunately he is in a different field of work or else I would gladly pass on my clients.

I have never know unemployment.  I never will know it now. I have been lucky. 

I wish there was something I could do for my friend though.

Grandad is really pissing me off.

He has this habit of messing around with software, and has installed a load of useless crap on this PC.  It could now be outpaced by a snail on Valium.

Of course I keep uninstalling things, but for every program that is removed, there is half a ton of crud that is left behind, whose sole function seems to be to slow the machine down and take up large chunks of disk space.

I wouldn’t mind too much if he used the programmes but invariably he plays with them for an hour or so, gets bored with them and then heads off to the pub leaving me with the mess.

His latest fad is Twitter.

I don’t like Twitter.  It is just mindless chatter that epitomises the modern generations and is a distraction.  Unfortunately, he seems to like it.  He has garnered quite a following by all accounts, though I can’t understand why.

I tried removing it, but he came back from the pub the other night, a little worse for wear and threw a mighty stroppy fit.  He demanded his Twitter.  As we are running low on crockery (again), I had to relent and reinstall it.

Now I have to suffer a barrage of notifications every time one of his pals writes something.  It is very irritating.

The sooner he gets bored of it, the better.

The Twit.

Sometime back in the early 90s, I bought my first PC.

At the time, I wanted a top of the range model, as I wanted it to be future proof.  I therefore went for the maximum amount of memory and a huge hard disk size.  Everyone said I was mad, and that I would never be able to fill the hard disk, but I went ahead and bought it anyway.

It had 2Mb of memory, and the hard disk was a massive 40Mb.  It was a very fast PC too, and ran at 16Mhz.  I was the envy of the office.  It was worth every penny of the £1,800 I spent.

I’m writing this on a laptop.  It cost me under €800.  It has 2Gb of memory and a 250Gb hard disk.

So it has 1,000 times the memory, and 62,500 times the hard disk space, and cost about one third the price.

Grandad uses the laptop from time to time, and has filled up most of the hard disk with his files.  Frankly, I’m a bit wary of those files, and I’m a bit scared to look at them, but he is very possessive about them so I have to leave them there.  He says it took him a long time to find those files on the Internet and has threatened violence if I remove them.

I decided to buy myself some additional hard disk space.  It is a 1Tb drive.  A Terabyte is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes, or the equivalent to 25,000 times my original PC’s capacity.  Numbers like that scare me a little.

I am expecting delivery any time.  My problem is that if Grandad finds out about it, he is going to appropriate it for his vast collection of images.

How many glossy photos can you store in a Terabyte?

A hell of a lot, I would imagine…