But sometimes a situation is slightly more opaque and you're
not quite sure what just happened...
I was in the pub last week, nursing a G&T and
waiting for Domestic Slut and La Chanteuse for a long-overdue, post-cat
acquisition (DS), post-wedding (LC) catch up. I’d elegantly plonked myself down
at a table next to the radiator, wrapped up in a leather jacket against the
biting South London, February winds.
Whipping my iPad out of my bag (it was either that, or the
copy of Horse & Rider I had at
the bottom of my bag, and I tend to find that any equine periodical tends to
elicit very peculiar looks anywhere inside the M25), I settled in with my drink to catch up on some reading.
At the next table was a man in his mid-thirties, tapping
away at a laptop. Every so often, as I took a sip of my drink, I could see him
looking over in my direction. I thought nothing of it, and carried on with an
excellent and highly recommended Wired piece on Gunther von Hagens until a
gentle cough caused me to look round.
“Um, er, excuse me,” he’d stopped typing and was looking at
me from over his laptop. I lowered my iPad and looked up. “Are you any good
with computers?”
I laughed. “God, no, not in the slightest. Sorry.” And went
back to my plastinated cadavers.
“Oh, um… I was hoping you’d be able to help me… I don’t know
quite what’s going on.”
“I really don’t think I’m going to be much use, I promise
you.” Again, I tried to turn back to the screen.
“Oh, er, it’s just that… well, I’m typing, and then I go
backwards, and it types over the text that’s already there.”
“Oh! Oh gosh,” I said, slightly baffled that there would be
any sort of computing difficulty I’d ever be able to lend a useful hand with.
“You’ve just hit the overwrite button. Try hitting the ‘insert’ key – that
should fix it.”
He tapped a button on the keyboard. “Ah! That’s done it. A
stroke of brilliance. You’re clearly…” He looked down at the table. “Oh, sorry,
would you mind if I just…? Hi, yep, what
is it? I’m just…”
I turned away as he took the phonecall, to see my companions
bluster in from the cold night outside.
I never found out what I clearly
was; whether he was clearly in need
of a little more computer literacy; or whether he was just so clearly terrible at the chatting up-thing
that it was difficult to tell it from a genuine cry for tech support.
6 comments:
When i doubt, assume you're being chatted up and rest easy in the knowledge that you've still got it?
Bess: You're right. It's really the only sensible option.
You were, without a doubt, being chatted up. Surely there are no men in their 30s who don't know about the insert key of death? I learnt that lesson a long time ago (about the time when most of an essay was deleted through exuberant typing).
You can preen.
NC: Well this was my theory. But then I thought, maybe, it would be SUCH an appalling way to chat someone up that maybe he actually doesn't know? Hmm.
I would consider the possibility that it was a combination package...that he was truly a lost dog in tall grass about the technology and when he looked around for help a attractive young woman seemed like a good person to ask on a couple of levels.
Mike: Efficient flirting! Now that's one possibility I hadn't considered.
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