ninme

This is hilarious. Hilarious.

The Times - Ladies! I have nothing to declare but my genius, by Gerard Baker

I am a new man this week. In the long twilight struggle to rescue the last vestiges of my credibility as a husband and father I am freshly armed with a most potent, perhaps life-altering, weapon.

For years I have had to endure the whips and scorns of a wife and five daughters who have come to regard the only man in the house as living proof that the modern male is a superfluity. When it comes to anything that requires even the most mundane demonstration of household technical prowess, I am, to put it in the most contemptuous terms of my American daughters, a loser.

Unlike my father, who could, given time, fix just about anything around the house, who rose to the challenge of a broken appliance with courage and patience, I’m essentially incapable in this most critical of male activities. …

All the time, these pathetic little tableaux of domestic incompetence are played out to the soundtrack of a rhythmic tut-tutting from a wife who long ago demonstrated to any reasonable person the utter futility of my existence.

But no more. I’ve a distinctly male swagger this week. I’d swear my voice is half an octave lower; if the mood persists I might even go out and buy myself a pair of overalls. The reason for my new found self-confidence is that I have discovered power cycling.

If it sounds technical, that is just as it should be. It does not involve bicycles. It is a way of fixing computers and, perhaps, I’m told, other electronic items. It is, let’s be honest, man’s work.

To the uninitiated it might even imply a hint of danger.

I’m glad that I have no evidence that he’ll ever be likely to read this blog, since I like Gerry and I’d hate to flatten his newly-invigorated masculinity, but I’ve been doing this, oh, for ages.

It’s probably simplest if I tell you exactly how it changed my life.

The other night my 12-year-old daughter gloomily broke off from e-mailing her friends on the computer to tell me that the internet wasn’t working. As she did, I could see she was mentally preparing for a long haul, a few desultory efforts on my part involving some key strokes that would result, as it always does, in a phone call to the cable company, and, in another few days, the arrival of a real man with a screw-driver and a tool belt.

But as it happened, a male friend told me that very night over dinner that a lot of computer problems could be solved by “power cycling” a modem. Here, from start to finish, he explained, in a conspiratorial whisper, is how you do it: You turn off the computer, unplug the modem, sit around for a few minutes, plug it back in and turn it on.

He’s using a PC. How can I tell? You don’t have to shut down the computer if you’re on a Mac.

(Yes, I am well-versed in the power-cycling arts.)

Second item (swallow your coffee all ye who enter here):

A friend of mine, an Oxford alumnus, was recently invited to lunch by the head of his old college. Knowing what was coming, he duly packed his chequebook. Having dispensed with that part of the discussion, the principal then moved on. Perhaps his guest would consider doing tutorials, at a rate of, say, £50 an hour?

Now, my friend is a distinguished journalist. So he said, well, yes, maybe he could spare a few hours a week to pass on some of his accumulated wisdom to undergraduates.

No, no, no, the head of the college quickly interjected. He didn’t want him to teach, but to sponsor tutorials given by Fellows of the college. My friend politely declined, so he never learnt exactly what they had in mind.

Perhaps the idea was that the tutor and the student would wear baseball caps with the donor’s insignia for the duration of the tutorial? Or maybe the tutor would begin each session with a statement from his sponsor. “This educational experience is brought to you in part by the kind generosity of Fred Smith.” Better still, maybe college choristers could be on hand at the start of each tutorial with a customised jingle?

“Oh we can learn about Catullus and Horace and Lucan But if it hadn’t been for Baker we’d be studying in Luton.”

Pffffffffff-[breath]-hahah