What do you want to do now...
Every afternoon at about this time I get the call! Around half-past seven give or take a minute or two. The sun’s still cracking the tiles and the birds are chirruping and squawking in the trees and getting the proverbial finger from scrounging red squirrels.
I lean over the dodgy arm of the swivel chair which commands my action position for the assaulting of my antique computer but needs additional persuasion to get the grey matter responding. A kick at the tower block and a twitch of the blinking mouse threatens as the bloody machine churns out weird wiggle words and a raspberry belch offer of access. It’s make your mind up time again! That it has done this frequently before excites me not a bit……. and NO it isn’t my elbow nudging the keyboard or viciously jiggling the cock-adoodle Google thing. The admission that I’m still a single finger prodder after eras physically misusing virtually every kind of windows (helpful asterisk?¡¿*) user aid, typewriter ink smudger, odd-ball, golf-ball processor etc ad nauseam, gives a clue!m
I take a deep breath. I’m now peering at the screen of a selfish techno tool as it noisily burps into life. The monster has decided to co-operate.
‘What do you want to do next? ….as if I didn’t know, it jauntily inscribes.
This may seem to be an innocent query but when it happens every time I try to communicate, tap in a break between sentences or have the inclination to take the fat ginger, black and white pussycat out for a constitutional scratching as I get odd ball real word lexicographic starvation. Then back to techno misery.
Sharper, quicker off the mark than I. The conutempter takes over with frightful suggestions. My ‘bog off’ reiteration gains no ground but the ‘don’t do-it-yourself’ instruction bursts in and the screen becomes dead and alive then dizzy again with ampersand diphthong vowel shapes suggestive of even more app/stick/ box mousy escape routes..
At this juncture perhaps I should admit that my tooling partner soul-mate is brownedoff too with balmy, fogged-out weather reports and repetitive ‘hit the X if you don’t like this ad’ rhetoric rhubarb. Apart from being dis-chuffed at pseudo non-etymological jargon (does Micro-very-soft have any other sort I wonder?) she’s practicing her influenza sneezing exercises! Patiently, I am still trying to create an equally gormless answer to the “What do you want to do next” oneliner. Gets direly dafter repeatedly does it not!
A straying finger lends the keyboard a hand…the ‘What do you want to do next’ poser has been gazumphed, rephrased, trampled into the doormat and kicked in touch by coronavirus power masterfully allowing technology little choice.
‘Get off your arse and let’s go somewhere’ is now a decidedly definite NO-NO!
Even the namesake Corona restaurant on Altea promenade is precluded as it would.
My inner grumblings have been dealt a massive ongoing shock. After the best part of half-a-century of restaurant lunches I am now being forced to eat at home. From enjoying the gastronomic gourmet cum self confessed glutton title, I have become a bloody kitchen slave and ‘commis’ waiter. I wouldn’t mind so much but I am expected to wash the pots and pans too!
Imagine my chagrin, having to answer “What do you want to do next” then for the sake of harmony clean the gravy splashed microwave.
And an aside. Get a ‘home delivery’ heat up odds & sods or or starve!
On a more horrible, miserable, tasteless level the coronavirus disease has disrupted everything and everybody with a dose of protective measures and others ‘LOCKDOWN’ ordered to a degree that it is doubtful whether some of my fleshpot haunts are likely to even open again or at least this year. This is a sad state of affairs but inevitable… yes, life goes on.
“WHAT DO YOU WANT TO DO NOW” The sentence which for me originally began as a joke has become a tasteless watch-phrase and is no longer even slightly funny.
Enforced hand and table disinfecting in supermarkets, restaurants and the like plus other strictures such as mask wearing in public has made life irritating…. hopefully not to go on forever. I am sure many thousands of people have stoically expected LOCKDOWN to be over sooner than later with MASKS discarded pronto and restrictions reduced…. but when?
As for the ‘WHAT DO I WANT NOW’ bit, without exception I think we all want to see the end of LOCKDOWN and with it, the end of this debilitating, infernal epidemic!