Saturday, 18 November 2017

a spot of oil

The lights in the glass walled balcony have been left on, that is typical of the son. One of his early morning trips to the bathroom, all the switches flicked. The glowing orange LED light pours out into the yard. The patterns of the window glass are projected on the wall outside in the narrow yard. The wall to the neighbour, his house wall, there is only one window there.
Go to the bathroom and turn the lights off on the way.
It is half past six in the morning, still dark outside.
And it is cold.

At seven, dawn, or dim light from outside anyway. It is cloudy, when was dawn today anyway? Dawn was at six forty eight.

And by now it is eight, the son has gone for his walk, the cat is sitting on the window ledge purring, and the wife is asleep. Or still in bed, and awake.

This is the weekend.
Chaos. The son is back from his early morning town walk. And now dismantling some old floppy drive.
So the thirteen-year-old brings the errant machine to his sixty-two year father. All the small metal parts are stiff and old, they move as if in slow motion.
A tiny spot of penetrating oil, and help the twenty three year old floppy drive mechanism. Back and forth, work the oil into the joints.
Wipe of the surplus, that would otherwise catch dust or drip or do other things useless to the functionality of the device.
And then it clickety clacks and the disk ejects properly, the slow motion effect is gone.
So the whole item can be reassembled, put in it's casing again.
And now all those age old games can be played again, those games stored on a single disk, a disk not capable of storing more than eight hundred kilobytes.
These days, we talk of terabytes, atabytes, every bit of information digital stored in a racial memory needing complex devices to render it accessible to humans.



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