OK Computer

It seems to be my destiny that no matter how much I try to appear professional and organised, nor how much time I spend making sure it happens, it never quite pans out – as was the case this morning for my first lesson as a fully paid up EFL teacher.

My pupil, Alessandro, was due at 10am so I set up my stall in good time in the formal dining room (whose 15’ table and baroque elegance is a tad undermined by one end housing the three piece suite where Romolo reclines to watch TV). I switched on my computer to bring up the PowerPoint I was using as well as to long on to YouTube only to find a screen from Vodafone in Italian. Even with my limited knowledge of the language I could figure out that something was wrong, so what else could I do but call for Stephen to come to the rescue?

Despite our best efforts – or rather, his best efforts and my standing watching, trying to look helpful – no internet connection had been made by the time Alessandro arrived. Being the nice man that he is, he immediately joined in and tried to see what he could do, while I thought that he shouldn’t be paying me to sit there fiddling with my computer.

To cut a long, and not really very interesting story, short, we have ended the day without a connection, even though Stephen tried his best while I was teaching and we went after lunch to Marco and Maddalena’s house to use their Wi-Fi. The problem? I have used up all the monthly allowance in six days. Oops. How was I to know that when Stephen said we had 7GBs, which was all right but not enough to watch movies, he wasn’t talking about capacity but amount of usage? Anyway, the lesson was saved because Alessandro, being under thirty, pressed a few buttons on his phone and like magic (otherwise known as Bluetooth, which is a total mystery to me) up came the Internet. The young have it so easy these days.

After that, the day degenerated into an anti-climax; driving around in the afternoon to see if there were any houses we had missed (no), then dinner for two at the pub. We thought we were going to be three and Luca, Stephen’s friend and computer scientist, was going to join us. That was until Stephen actually read the text correctly and realised that today was Saturday. His creativity with numbers is one of his more endearing qualities.