As too often happens when we are distracted by life’s typical tumble, I neglected my technical infrastructure for work until suddenly I found myself unable to do any as accustomed. And this time of stressfully productive readjustment is ongoing.
The old Asus VivoBook S15 with the screen touchpad from Hell has a faulty keyboard I’m told can’t be replaced, so I was using my cheap, lightweight Mitsai Bluetooth keyboard that I bought ages ago for writing sessions on my iPhone for all those frequent times when my companheira tires of me being a dictator. (Speech-to-text, that is. I aspire to being a woke radical liberal feminist socialist Ukraine-loving trumpanzee target otherwise.)
Said companheira, the doutora as she is known to most, finally got around to the surgery for those cataracts which terrified me every time she tried to drive at night, and the best place for such corrections is in Lisbon, so that’s where we went for a few days.
All went well, as is the case for most of these procedures. I wasn’t worried, because in my days as a medical materials consultant and inventor I saw many recordings of these procedures, and I reviewed thick stacks of documents for outcomes with regulatory departments and talked with a number of surgeons and the technical support specialists who served them. So I knew that a complete disaster like my mother’s first small incision cataract surgery was unlikely.
But the doutora was terrified. Despite more than 40 years of experience in medicine and surgery and having the highest medical qualifications possible in Portugal. Probably more terrified because of that, and because of her insider knowledge of the true condition of the country’s health services.
This taught me important lessons. That I’m a schmuck is one, but I already knew that. All that technical knowledge in my head, all those remembered outcome statistics from a past life utterly blinded me more than cataracts can to the human side of the matter. May I not forget this soon.
I have half a dozen drafts in my articles queue for this Substack that deal with arguments and details of emergent technical matters or problems resulting from them. Those who are opposed to new tech or who have what we might consider unreasonable reservations are too often dismissed as idiots or Luddites or some other unflattering term.
And we dream of a world, a Satellitenstadt perhaps, with All Watched over by Machines of Loving Grace. Forgetting to consider what really matters: the human spirit.
If our desired outcome is merely a technical, physical state, an efficiency or a line item on a balance sheet, perhaps something is out of balance.
Do we consider the comfort of routine? The fathomless depths of spirits which may soar or sink? Are these our inspiration, our comfort, and our reason to give comfort? Or are we in a Mephistophelean bargain for shiny pyrite knowledge at the small price of our souls?
Cui bono?
I read recently that we should fear those who control technology more than the technologies themselves. Sounds right when you think of wankers like Elon Musk. Or even some mindless project mismanager in a language service “team” who applies tech and protocol without understanding to disqualify the qualified and make iconic idiocy their altarpiece.
So there I was in Lisbon with the love of my life about to go under a tiny diamond knife, and I realized my crappy auxiliary keyboard wouldn’t survive all I had to say about that and other things. So I caught we caught a taxi to the Colombo Center mall after her post-surgery follow-up, and I browsed the options at FNAC. And ended up with an HP 680 Comfort Dual-Mode Keyboard and Mouse Combo for about four times what I paid for my flimsy carry-in-my-backpack keyboard.
I won’t give you a detailed review of the thing, as there are many others on the market like it, surely, many probably better. It’s much cheaper than what I used to spend on a good keyboard back in the day. But so much better than those.
By the time I figured out where the hell the PrintScreen
button was, I had discovered a dozen other functions hardwired into the keyboard that I usually click around in various menus and dialogs to get to. How convenient. And then there are all those programmable buttons on the keyboard and accompanying pointing device that I’ll never use. Huzzah.
I’m already feeling entitled to the comfort of the big padded wrist rest integrated on the keyboard, regretting that I didn’t buy something like this long ago. Instead I chose the lazy option of ergonomically damaging convenience in my laptop’s keyboard with impossible contrast to read the keys, and the touchpad which soon causes strain injuries if I don’t take care not to use it like a Victorian lady drinking her tea with extended pinky.
Many people have sensibly chosen such options long before me, and I recognized the sense of that, but I didn’t get it at an emotional level, just like at first I didn’t get how a person accustomed to performing major surgeries under difficult conditions could fear the simplest and safest of common surgeries. Yes I am, you can say it.
The next step is to take that laptop off the table altogether and put one of those big monitors from the office that I hardly use in its place. Or keep HDMI adapters and cables with me when I travel to do that with the flat screen TVs in hotels and vacation rentals. Until I can find a decent portable Bluetooth monitor with a portrait mode, that is.