Letter From America: Miscalculation
After a miscalculation involving a jet of water that was stronger than was wise, Ronnie Bray's long-serving calculator refuses to do sums.
It is nothing special. A mass-produced cheap plastic calculator with minimal functions, although it does have a photo-electric cell that makes batteries redundant, and it worked perfectly without a hiccough for ten years.
It sits on my desk either on top of, or under piles of, unrelated but essential papers, notebooks, and brochures, in company with a telephone, a magnifying glass, a beaker holding pens, pencils, and markers, a comb, a pair of dog claw clippers, a jaunty Taiwanese study lamp, CD cases that are empty or holding the wrong disc, a device for locating wooden studs in the walls of the house, a diary, scraps of paper with story ideas in an indecipherable hand, a stapler, a Castle Hill refrigerator magnet for Dennis and Helen Livesey, a small dispenser of Elmer’s Glue – which is the adhesive that holds the USA together - two plastic mementoes, a Union Flag and a bunny rabbit that my sweet Luke made for me, and a note to myself about the imprudence of run-on sentences.
It has gathered dust in Yorkshire, Arizona, Tennessee, Montana, and Arizona again. Yesterday, I decided that it deserved to have the grime removed, so I used the foaming hand soap dispenser at the kitchen sink, and scrubbed it in with the vegetable brush.
It gleamed as good as new as its forgotten pristine white came out from under the accumulation of a decade of neglect. All that was left to do was rinse off the lather, dry it, and road test it.
Perhaps the jet of water was stronger than was wise for cleaning delicate electronic equipment. Perhaps the angle that I held it against the stream was too obtuse, perhaps it was time for it to shuffle off its mortal coil, or perhaps I have been educated beyond my character and should know better than to wash anything electric with a lot of water.
Not surprisingly, the road test delivered a verdict of ‘Unresponsive.’
"Hmn! Water inside," I mused, and placed it against the kitchen patio doors to dry out. Which, in the eighty degree heat it should have done in less than no time. However, all subsequent road and bench tests demonstrate that it is a flatliner.
It now lies on the kitchen table, and every so often I punch the "On" button in the hope that it will flicker back to life and give me answers to simple sums that a series of hardworking teachers at Spring Grove school could not help me find, and that it will continue to do so for a second decade, at the end of which time I do not expect to be anywhere that a calculator will be required, not even for the resolution of that most vexing of theological questions, "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin without jostling each other".
Perhaps the calculator died because it suffered from the curse of modern times, built-in obsolescence, and perhaps that is what made it self-destruct after ten years use, and my ablating it was one of the happenstances of synchronicity that cause many an innocent to experience piercing and painful pangs of guilt.
Maybe the hand soap has an ingredient that is specifically corrosive to printed circuits, or maybe the water that entered refuses to leave, even under the urgings of the desert’s afternoon sun. I half-console myself with the idea that the liquid crystal display, the machine-user interface, is waterlogged and that the device is working perfectly but invisibly. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera!
They do say that you cannot teach an old dog new tricks. That might be true, but I wouldn’t bet on it. However, this old dog has learned something that he ought to have taken on board decades ago:
"If it ain’t broke, don’t clean it!"
