Category Archives: between books

Dear Deere – – –

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Jack doesn’t quite make it on time with the Wednesday post – –

The story starts when I was asked/pressured by the Prinicipal of the college where I was working, to get an MBA. I had been teaching management courses for a while so hardly surprising. I enrolled for the part-time program at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh. One of the courses was Economics and our lecturer focused on two case studies each week that we were meant to research before the following week. His favorite ploy was to march back and forward at the start of the day (which ran from 8am to 6pm) talking about the previous week’s case studies, twirl on his heel and point at some hapless fool. I always hid behind a pillar!

Most of the thirty or so folk signed up simply wanted to pass the exam, but our professor had announced at the start that he wasn’t interested in that. He would introduce us to ‘interesting stuff’ instead! There weren’t enough pillars in the room either.

Of course numbers dwindled until on the final day there were only two of us present so nowhere to hide. The previous week’s case studies had been Hewlett-Packard and John Deere. I’d had a very challenging week at the college (Head of two departments simultaneously), so no opportunity to do any research. He turned and pointed at me, so I was under the spotlight all day with no escape.

Around the same time Wendy and I were planning to get married so I visited her folks in Tennessee. I told this story to her mom, who couldn’t understand a word I said – except for two – John Deere. She imagined I was a fan, so for a few years all my birthday, Christmas and anniversary presents were of a theme – the mug, bath mat, bedspread, cap, model – – –

We lived for five years in a very small village in East Fife and got friendly with a farming couple nearby. When we finally moved away we donated some furniture to them. Alan came down in his tractor and cattle trailer to collect them. It was his brand new massive John Deere!

So I got my picture taken sitting on his tractor, wearing the hat, holding the mug, with the bath mat on my knee and the model on the mud wing.

We made our annual visit to Tennessee and Wendy needed her Walmart ‘fix’ but when we were wandering around we found to our horror there was a whole isle devoted to John Deere stuff! So I showed the picture to Wendy’s Mom and re-told her the whole story now that we could meet midway linguistically- I’ve never gotten a John Deere present from her since.

Try Turning it off and On?

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Jack gets there just on time again –

My recent experiences trying unsuccessfully to deal with technology –

  1. We were more or less gifted a twenty year old riding mower three years ago. We got it with a flat battery and flat tire but managed to deal with that. However this year time and age finally caught up. After a few weeks of ever increasing problems it’s time had come. I spent a couple of days rehearsing and honing my speech to Wendy justifying the purchase of a replacement. Finally I summoned the courage and said “ about the riding mower, dear’ and she said “yes, get us a new one”!
  2. My four year old laptop finally gave up the ghost after two keyboard replacements so I went on to the dreaded Amazon and ordered a new replacement. It arrived a week later and worked fine for the first few days. Then completely died as I was in the middle of something. I messaged the seller and got a helpful set of instructions which I’d already tried to no avail. Their second response was a link to HP’s warranty page and their return policy, which showed we’d get our money back less 20% and less a further 20% because we didn’t report the fault within three days. When we went to the HP site we discovered our new laptop was over a year old and out of warranty. Sigh!
  3. Wendy lets me out of the house during the current lock-down every two weeks to do the garbage run to the local re-cycling place. As there are usually a number of sacks, I take our SUV “Black Angus’ (a Dodge Journey). Today I went out, loaded the sacks, got in and turned the key – clunck! It seems that modern cars run stuff in the background even when parked and switched off. So not designed for lock-downs when they might not be run for a couple of weeks. Luckily we have a charger and a long cable!

I remember being quite enthused about new technology when I was younger – cars you could work on yourself that didn’t need a computer to be plugged in, cassette players, open reel tape recorders, LPs that had sleeves you could read, dial up internet with that crazy sound. But it began to suck us into an over dependency – – –

On technology!