Chrissie tore the headphones from her ears and flung them down on the table in front of her. The voiceover that she had so carefully recorded to accompany the slideshow of images for her lesson on climate change was mysteriously silent when she attempted to play it back. What was wrong? What had gone wrong? What the **** was ****-ing wrong!
She pressed record again and had another go: testing, testing! Playing it back produced more obstinate silence. It had worked yesterday. Why wouldn’t it-? Her eyes fell on the trailing cable that stretched from the microphone, across the table and … down to the floor! She bent down to follow its course and realised with a gasp of exasperation that the end was dangling free in mid-air. She had forgotten to plug it into the computer!
It took another two hours to complete the recording to her satisfaction. Now that the microphone was live, her voice seemed singularly uncooperative. She stumbled over simple phrases; her mouth went dry and the words sounded forced and strange; a coughing fit interrupted an otherwise perfect section. Then the neighbour started up his lawn mower and she had to get up to close the window and shut out the background noise.
At last the slideshow and commentary were complete and she was ready to upload it to the cloud (wherever that might be), from which, her head teacher had assured her, the children in her class would be able to download and watch it at times that suited their own home routines. She watched hopefully as the progress of the upload was reported on her screen: 20%, 40%, 50%, 75% … and then it seemed to get stuck. Had her computer crashed? Was this cloud too full for the whole of her video to fit?
Gavin wandered into the kitchen. It was a rest day for him and, with it being Saturday, he had been hoping that they might have spent some time together. Chrissie, however, was determined to provide the same quality of teaching to those members of her class who were forced to stay at home as those who would be physically present in school next week. And that meant double lesson preparation and mastering technology that she had never imagined she would ever need.
‘Would you like a cuppa?’ he asked mildly.
‘OK. Thanks,’ his wife answered absently without taking her eyes off the screen. A small blue circle was rotating in the centre of it, which, she believed, indicated that the computer was thinking about something. Whatever it was seemed to be taking it a long time – like Alfie, a little boy in her class who always sat with his eyes closed for about five minutes before answering her questions. The final outcome of his cogitation was highly variable: sometimes it was so absurd that she hardly knew where to start in explaining where he had gone wrong in his reasoning; but on other occasions his response was so deep that she wondered if she were in the presence of some sort of philosophical genius. Let’s hope the computer was emulating Alfie on one of his good days!
Gavin busied himself with the kettle and mugs. While the tea was brewing, he went to the cupboard and got out the biscuit barrel. Then he fished out the tea bags from the mugs and added milk before carrying them across to the table.
‘No! Not there!’ Chrissie shouted as he set down one of the mugs near her right hand. Put it further along where I can’t knock it over.’
Gavin obediently moved he mug and sat down next to his wife, taking care to keep far enough away that he would not obstruct her arm as she moved the computer mouse.
‘I think something’s gone wrong,’ she muttered. ‘It’s taking forever to upload.’
‘Kenny always used to complain that our internet connection was slow,’ Gavin pointed out.
‘But it got up to seventy-five percent quite quickly and then got stuck,’ Chrissie argued. ‘Why would it do that?’
‘Maybe the computer’s doing too many other things. I remember being told that having too many different applications running all at once could slow them down.’ Gavin reached over and peered at the screen. ‘How about closing some of these windows?’
Chrissie relinquished the mouse and Gavin started going methodically through the tabs at the bottom of the screen, selecting each and closing it down. Eventually, only the file upload window was left and, to his immense satisfaction, the counter had increased to 90%. A few seconds later it announced that the slide show had been successfully saved in the mysterious cloud.
‘Thanks,’ Chrissie smiled. ‘Now I can get back to editing this week’s learning plan for the parents. And then, once that’s done I’ll be all set up for Monday.’
‘Have a biscuit first,’ Gavin urged, holding out the barrel, ‘and give yourself a breather. You’ve been at this all day, it must be time for a break.’