Deja Vu

I’ve been here before (Don’t Blame It On Me) and I should have known better…….

My recently purchased MacBook Air was a treat to myself. As can rightly be expected of expensive Apple products, I assumed it would work faultlessly.

Except, the keyboard seemed a little erratic and the trackpad had a will of its own. The keyboard would randomly throw up double letters or at times not respond to my tap at all. The cursor kept skipping lines mid sentence or at times refused to respond at all. I persevered for a while but clearly something was wrong.

I phoned the store and was put through to their technical support team and asked to do various sequences of connecting and disconnecting from charge, button pushing, holding and rebooting my laptop. No improvement, so back to the shop I went. ‘My very new MacBook appears to have developed a fault!’ I confidently said to the tech support assistant who looked young enough to be my grandson. He looked at his colleague and a raise of his eyebrows and shrug of his shoulders was sufficient for me to sense a frustration at my generation of the not so tech savvy.

By way of explanation, when this happened before, it was before my Parkinson’s diagnosis when my slightly wonky brain was already beginning to affect the right side of my body. Back then, once I realised that it wasn’t my computer that had the problem, I very adeptly started to type (respectably quickly, I might add) with my left hand and have done so ever since.

As I explained about my unresponsive and at times too responsive keyboard and trackpad, the young IT guru sighed again with a look that said, ‘I doubt it’ but I carried on regardless. As I was explaining, it began to dawn on me. I should have known better. I have been here before. Granted it was a few years ago but never the less, the scenario was almost identical. It wasn’t my new laptop, it was my left hand, now beginning to fail me the way my right hand had done all those years earlier.

The young IT guru, having tested my laptop extensively, could find nothing wrong with it. He suggested I sit and ‘play with it’ for ten minutes until I could show him what the problem was. With a heavy emphasis on the word ‘play’, he then proceeded to serve the next customer while I searched for evidence of the keyboard fault. I ‘played with it’ as suggested, for ten minutes, despite realising that the problem was with me. As my IT guru was still engrossed with another customer, I made a hasty retreat from the store, signalling to him that all was well and whatever he had done had worked miraculously.

I managed to type, albeit erratically with my right hand for around three years after first noticing a problem, before it became too frustrating and slow, at which point I switched to my left hand. Running out of hands, I’m hoping I have some time before I have to adapt to the voice activated software available on my laptop. Here’s hoping it’s straightforward and doesn’t require the help of the IT guru!

PS Mum, don’t worry. You know how I love to talk and now I have the perfect excuse. Voice activated software will be a joy to learn to use!