CoVID-19 Day 50
I’m struggling to string any thoughts together at the moment. I wasn’t going to listen to the announcement at 7pm as I thought it would just be rambling nonsense until I caught up on Twitter. Then I listened to 13 minutes of incoherent yet calculated guff but unable to follow it with my eyes. The messenger was too awful to acknowledge, too crass, jingoistic and yet sure of himself. In that short space of time the Prime Minister confirmed, without a shadow of a doubt, what a maniacal monster he is.
Up until then I had spent the evening with an unruly MacBook trying to get it to act as a webserver, i.e. getting it to behave like the other servers giving me the pages I created in my browser. After nearly 3 hours of the afternoon updating its operating system I’d achieved nothing because the server was what I cared about.
We have been thrown to the wolves
Like a car owner with little more than the most rudimentary knowledge of what goes on under the bonnet I scrambled to find help on the internet and then did my best to follow instructions up to the point where they stopped being useful or making sense. I finally got to a place where I could establish I’d made progress. I was in relatively familiar territory and it all indicated that everything was in place for me to see my pages but the browser would have none of it. “Sorry I cannot connect to this server”.
All that was to be done was a restart — a stab in the dark but, magnificently, it did the trick. I definitely had a hand in the success even though a likely scenario was “the operation was a success but the patient died”. I hadn’t spent 5 hours pointlessly staring at pipes and kicking tyres. I had actually fixed it but as much by luck as judgement. However none of that really matters. I’d achieved my aim with no casualties.
It was the usual Boris Johnson, talking up the achievements of the public while merely blowing his own tuneless trumpet and offhandedly insulting those who’d paid the highest price, by his manner. When onto the matter at hand he rambled as if he were making it up as he went along (he might have been) and ended with the meaningless meme that is being universally condemned and ridiculed. But it wasn’t as meaningless or vacuous as I’d suspected it would be. It was toxic, the poison delivered in a single sentence. We could all go back to work if we had to. And it was delivered with diabolical brevity.
No brave face can be put on this. I could have lived with the server on my MacBook not serving me. I’d have found ways round it. It would have cost me time and convenience but would not have been a disaster. This is a disaster. Whatever can be done to mitigate the ensuing car crash, the seed has been sown that we can make up our own rules, precisely what his lords and masters wanted. We have been thrown to the wolves.
Why would he drop this message on a Sunday evening in a recorded message with no commentary or critique? To say we could go to work if that work could not be done at home and drop that on us hours before the start of a new working week. If you wanted to drop a bombshell to create maximum damage and at a time when no one would be around to deal with the fallout, it would be 7pm on a Sunday.