I am a big fan of quotations and of Douglas Adams, and two of my favourite quotes by him came to mind today.
He wrote, ’ We are stuck with technology when what we really want it stuff that works.’
And
‘Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.’
If at this point you are expecting the writings of a middle-aged woman baffled by some aspect of technology that a babe-in-arms would handle, then you are more or less right, and you might want to go off and do something else.
I am not at all sure why you cannot have two Twitter accounts from one email address? More than that, why the hell not?
I have set up a twitter account for the Oxfam shop – called, just in case you live locally – OxfamBookPetersfield.
(It would not surprise my friend Anthony to note that yes, I meant to put OxfamBooksPetersfield – but didn’t proof read and so I am stuck with the missing S as I have no way of knowing how to amend it.)
I tweet badly and in a desultory fashion – not because I am not interested but I don’t think I have much interesting to say and I am not attuned enough to be re-tweeting really interesting stuff.
I want this account to be accessed from my laptop as well as my phone and my other twitter account, the one you find me on, to be accessed from my phone too.
Why is that too much to ask?
Anyway, we badly need to find someone locally to take on the DVD and vinyl & CDs side of the Oxfam bookshop business.
Our two music and film experts have taken it into their heads to move to the West Country and the very nice young woman who offered to take it on, has taken it into her head to go travelling in a VW camper around New Zealand for a year.
So, I reckon we need a young person who can do the aforementioned stuff, and at the same time run a Facebook account for the shop. And indeed, if I could find someone to do just the Facebook stuff, it might throw up, as it were, a young person or two who likes music and film.
But I am useless at Facebook – these blogs only get out there because WordPress took the whole issue of my hands and do it for me without so much as a by your leave, or further bothering my not-so-pretty little head about it.
(And, I don’t like Facebook. I really don’t need to a see a picture of your Sunday lunch or know that you have just bought a fab pair of jeans…..)
I need a digital native.
Which I me definitely not, but even at my advanced age there are some things which I take for granted – Google and email, for example. (Though I can remember a time without them …..)
I heard the bright people at Oxfam in Huntingdon, faced with the same mountain of books they had to re-cycle, had contacted local art college and offered them the ‘dead’ books.
These are then used to make paper sculptures and other artworks as part of their course, and displayed in the shop window.
Never one to worry about stealing a bright idea, I fired off an email, suggesting a chat about it, to the head of visual arts at Petersfield School. ( No, we don’t have a college – we are a small, insignificant, but rather nice, market town.)
I think emails are better than a phone call, in the first instance, because a phone call can ambush someone and an email gives them time to think about their response.
Well, that is to say, think about it for a bit – a short bit. Emails are there to be responded to quite quickly even if it is only with a, ‘ Let me have a think about it and be in touch shortly,’ kind of email.
Not so in a school environment, it would seem…….