Bags and Bloggerology

'Basically inane,' is what went through my mind when I thought about any of the so-called ICT courses that were offered to us as Inservice Training at Mayhem.
The big thing for years had been to 'get teachers up to the highest level of ICT skills'. Ok, but that had the same ring to it as our City Council trying to encourage more people to walk. No pavements. No appropriate ICT courses. Unless you had arrived fully formed on the planet from another star system where computers worked totally differently - perfectly possible, quite likely in fact - there was never any way you could not already know how to use Word or the Internet.

What I discovered yesterday though, was that somewhere we miss out on some relatively basic skills because we don't need them very often.

My friend Ree e-mailed me to say that she had been trying to post a comment but always got an error message, had I inadvertently changed some of my settings? I went off to investigate, I could well imagine something mysterious happening last week when my Blogger was being insanely flakey.
But not so. In fact, when I finally found my way to Blogger's Help Centre, it turned out that many people were experiencing the same thing. We were told to do this, to do that, rub it with half a potato and bury it in the garden at full moon, stand on one foot and whistle the Internationale and finally, clear our cache.
'How do I clear my cache?' hollered people who, when I looked at their sites had all kinds of fancy bits and pieces going on that I wouldn't have the first clue how to do. And yet it's so simple.

It's so arbitrary and yet so huge, learning this new skill. And I do still think of it as new. There were no ICT lessons when I was at school, no personal computers or laptops. We've had to learn it all on the fly.
Even kids who nowadays do have lessons at school don't get taught all the things that would be useful to them.
Partly that's because often on a network like a school system, you can't do many of the things you can do at home, you can't do simple things like change the clock or clear the cache.

Partly it's because it's just another drug. Whatever you had planned to teach them on the computer, half of them would spend most of the lesson finding Simpsons' porn or anything that could fly below the net nanny radar. Then your time would be spent policing those ones and not helping the ones who were actually doing the work.

Ah well, so far as Blogger is concerned, maybe it's fixed, maybe it's not, maybe I have to wait for the full moon.

Bags, likewise, are ridiculously important, I have no idea how men manage without them. I can't understand it, it's not like I carry make-up around with me, which is the explanation usually given, and given that I'm a constant weeder, it's not like I have stuff in my bag that has been missing since last April.

I have it in my head that somewhere there exists the perfect bag for me. It will be able to hold my (paper) notepad, pen, cards, purse, phone, hankies and wet-wipes, sunglasses, (small)camera, gum oh and water-bottle and a paperback. You see what I mean? What out of that lot do men not need to carry around and yet somehow they fit everything into a wallet.

And it's not like I see a bag as a fashion statement. Oh well, I do like it to look nice, nice to me that is.
I guffawed when my friend Canadian Karen wrote about a friend a work who was most put out by being given a fake designer bag. Well, maybe not guffawed, but I did say, 'Canadian Karen, that's ridiculous! The woman is lame! Don't hang out with her any more!' which was admittedly a stupid thing to advise with regard to a work colleague.

By coincidence, a couple of days later, there was a show on TV where a bossy Englishwoman (bossy is a term of endearment from my lips or keyboard) was sorting out the finances of a well-paid Essex couple. She had brought a selection of bags, designer and fake and asked the Essex woman to say which was which. She did not get a single one correct, nul points.

And then there was the storyline in Ugly Betty, but in case Brit friends and rellies haven't got there yet, I will say no more.

At the moment I have my bag and my overflow bags. The one in the picture was sent to me some years ago by my friend Dawn, so it has crossed the Atlantic and then come back again. I also have my shopping bags that Di sent me and really, my ideal bag should be able to fit one of these folded up inside as well. Just in case.

Not quite the Holy Grail, but I know that the ideal bag is out there, not in a Socratic sense, the bag which is but dimly represented by all bags in the sensory world, no, merely, the bag which will hold just the things I want and no more. And will I ever want to change it then?
Probably.
Sometimes it's the search that matters, not the find.