It's on its way!!!!!

I've just looked up the tracking on my order, my Laptop order, and it was with the driver at 07:59: 03. And it will be here by 6pm today! (I should hope, it's only half an hour from Reading and obviously they must realise that my laptop needs to be delivered FIRST. NOW in fact).
It might be here any minute. I don't think I ought to go upstairs and get dressed do you? I mean it might arrive and I might not hear the door bell. But I'd better get dressed cos I won't have time once it arrives. I could get dressed in the dining room so I can keep an eye out the window (we don't exactly have a busy road out there OOH a red van went past. Oh :( it went past. (Anyway Amtrak isn't red is it?)

OK. Five white vans of assorted sizes, six red cars, two blue ones and three landrovers, a horsebox, three tractors and and old man walking later, it arrived just after Barney so I didn't even see it pull in. In a big white van naturally.
so I began unpacking it and studying its bits of paper and noticed as I did so a kind of steeling of the will and stiffening of the sinews and a gathering of mental resources. This is, after all, a computer, right? It may look like a nice new shiny toy but it's going to have destructions.
(Well I hope it is, so far all I've uncovered is comprehensive warnings of all kinds of incomprehensible dangers in fifteen languages and a fat little book full of EU regulations and another fat little book bursting with stuff about licensing and a big sticky label warning me that if I don't like the licensing agreements I must not use any of the software and must promptly return the system! And I must do so before taking off the plastic wrapper...Oops! Too late)

So, assuming it does have destructions (and I haven't tossed them into the bin along with the warnings and threats and regulations) they will come couched in that special language which results from the uneasy menage-a-trois comprising the geeks who made it, the person who has to tell me how to do with it what I want to do and the translator (to mention only three of the probable hundreds of people who will have tampered with the wording before it got here). And at least one of the basic programs is new to me and the operating system is (I think) XP home rather than XP pro..I've no idea how many differences that may entail.

Ah! found the instructions. Hmm. Attach the battery, plug into the mains and move my finger about on the key pad. Follow the onscreen instructions.
Hmmmm!
See there's already a small problem. I'd quite like to open the case and just...look at it for a while before letting it start telling me what it would like me to do. But it won't let me. Maybe it needs power to open the top or maybe the open-the-top button is so obvious that any fool would be standing here looking at it in a puzzled way.
And once it's got power it's going to want me to do things (difficult if I can't open the case...I can imagine it sitting in the dark there saying "now press ok" and me turning it upside down and pressing all sorts of wrong buttons from the outside and it saying "under no circumstances turn the computer upside down once you have switched it on" ...."Arrggh, you turned me upside down, send me back to the factory I know I said I wanted to help a user but this is too much"). It'll want me to 'configure settings' (gulp) and 'choose preferences' (?). And then just when I start thinking, this isn't so hard after all it'll make some quite incomprehensible and probably rude suggestion that will make me think I did the last thing wrong. I probably will have.
Some weeks or months later, Eldest will say"why did you set it up like that?" and I will say "I don't know!"

I have had many computers and operating systems and programmes installed and all sorts. But actually I've never done this from scratch...I've always had a kind person do this first bit, all these first bits, for me. I think eldest feels it's time I learned to ride without stabilisers! Well he couldn't really be here anyway so I guess he's right!

Oh! Ooh! I've found the open-the-top button. It works! It's called a one-handed latch. I did try it but it needed me to be more positive.
here it is...open :)
And there's the one handed latch
And obviously what you do with this, is slide the button down and then left and up pops a litle hook so you can hang the lap top up with the coats when you come home. And when you want to take it for a walk you slide the button back again and the little hook becomes a little handle.
This isn't going to be so bad after all :)