Back in the day, when I was coming to the end of high school and deciding what to do next, there seemed to be two obvious choices (things I was good at): languages and computers. I ended up choosing the languages option because I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life fixing other people’s computer problems.

Six years later…

I am spending a number of hours of my final day in Perth fixing the family computer. This afternoon, as we tried to add an all-in-one device (printer/scanner/fax), something happened to make the keyboard and mouse stop working. The short story – we had to buy a new motherboard, and as the repairs couldn’t be done on the spot by the computer shop, and it included a lot of other stuff too, I ended up with the fun task of replacing the motherboard. That done, I am now halfway through my second attempt at installing Windows XP. (The first one was majorly stuffed up by Norton, and it was quicker for me to start again.)

Now computers are something I can do – this is the second I’ve reloaded Windows onto this week, and I know there’s another waiting for me upon my return to Sydney. And I identify too much with each person’s pain of having a computer that *should* work but doesn’t. But the irony of how things have turned out… The reason I chose languages was precisely to *avoid* spending my life doing this.

Anyway, switching off and back to Sydney… Where at least one more computer awaits me, if not more that I don’t yet know about!