Wahey! It’s a laptop party. And I’m invited. A frenzy of tapping and clicking surrounds me as there are three other people in the car / box / group of seats all with their laptops out. Rather sadly, two of us have actually moved to be in this part of the train from elsewhere. We can sense fellow lappies at a thousand paces. Or more accurately, four feet. Pheromones. Or Bluetooth. Or blue moons. Hmm, that didn’t work, but hey, it’s my tosh and I’ll do what I want to (can you see what I did there? Huh? Oh. Never mind).
Obviously, I also have my moleskine out, so I WIN, but that was through trying to avoid losing face – looking for ideas to type into another window. And no, moleskine is not a euphemism, although Virgin Trains are trying to turn them into a dirty word.
There is a thin veneer of envy between the Wintel workers and the solitary Mac acolyte. Punctured only by the smug aura emanating from those that do ‘proper’ jobs while Mr FancyPants amuses himself drawing pictures of Mickey for a living. Or something. There is a cry of alarm as in a hitherto unheard of display of audacity, FP PLUGS HIS LAPTOP in to a socket that’s NOT EVEN HIS!!! Oh no, my mistake – the noise is actually from someone trying to get further up the train so that they can [gasp] get off the platform a whole 15 seconds earlier.
I am surrounded by the insistent muttering of insects on plastic – clackety, clackety. Smackety, smackety, smack goes the delete key. It’s like thought moth lemmings diving off idea cliffs and impaling themselves on the short and qwerties. Or something.
Commuter #2 is a staccato thinker. B-b-b-b-bang goes the missive-drummer. B-b-b-ANG– there goes another thought. B-b-bang – another. He hits the keys and they sure stay hit. Damn that must be a good idea. His wife must love him.
Naturally, or maybe not, the woman in the group is the only one of the four who has bothered to learn to type. Her fingers glance effortlessly and noiselesslyover the keyboard. She won’t have arthritic fingers by the age of forty. Bitch. And look! She’s being properly productive — balancing a chequebook no less. Freak!
MacBoy doesn’t deign to join us in our keyboard orgy. Instead, his fingers (I typed gingers, if only) skate across the trackpad, doing who knows what. Perhaps he is creating an epoch-marking work of art that will re-define the boundaries of modern thinking and revolutionise the access to information for the poor and dis-enfranchised. Or maybe he’s designing the next ad for Persil.
And what of me? What of your, oh so cynical, hero? Here I am, with my block in full effect – novel #2 sits patiently waiting to be petted in another window, and yet here I am, with some strumpet of a document I haven’t even so much as bothered to save yet….
And now I have. Sadly, I will commit this to memory. Or at least to digital memory. And now, I shall critique my typing.
I’m not a bona-fide two finger typist. I type for the most part with three fingers. The main typing finger on my right hand is my middle finger [aside: Up Middle Finger], as I’ve had to change my hand position to be permanently near the delete key (or backspace, on the laptop). Hmm. There’s a message in there somewhere. Sigh. I did try learning to type once, but I discovered that I typed faster with fewer fingers. Or at least using fewer fingers. Ba-dum digit. But seriously, I guess my lack of hand-eye co-ordination could explain this.
Anyhoo. It’s getting to that time when more and more men in suits are frantically trying to save those extra 15 seconds in earnest, so I best sign off. And stare into Tom II’s eyes and wonder whether rabbits are inherently funny or not. I suspect not.
