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The Mouse Stops Moving
Nov. 24th, 2017 08:14 pmDriving to the library in the next town over for the monthly meeting of the Apple users group I'd managed one way or another to hear about a fair while ago (at least somewhat before the first iPhone was announced) and have been going to since, I wondered a bit about the "silent auction" I'd seen mentioned in the latest meeting notice. I've long supposed myself to have had a lot of poor luck in the raffles at the meeting (although managing to win an Apple IIe was a big change from that, even if afterwards the club president contacted me and said the club had managed to come into a second IIe system, which they were just offering me to take); for all that I'd stopped at the bank to withdraw some money just in advance of payday, I suppose I was just intent on seeing what would happen.
The agenda on the screen in the meeting room, though, left me with a first premonition the club president was soon explaining. As the group had warned a few meetings before, most of the executive had got to the point where they had to lay down the burden, and hardly anyone had offered to take their place. For that reason, the club was preparing to shut down; the silent auction was to sell off some of their video connection equipment. People kept explaining things were different now than they'd been when the club had been founded thirty years before with information readily available online; for that matter too, most of the people in the club did look as if they matched what some did say and could have been going to it since the beginning. (One older gentleman seated beside me during the meeting was playing Pokemon Go on his iPad, though.) I suppose I've not picked up on too many computer hints I was unaware of before, although I did make a presentation not that long ago about the iPad screen keyboard hints I'd stumbled on. It was rather just getting out once a month (save for summer and December) in a context different than work or church, and maybe a bit of thinking that asking for help online risks replies delivered with the curl of contempt "you shouldn't have upgraded in the first place" (although I can imagine that being proclaimed twenty-five years ago during the System 6-to-System 7 transition). Still, the group dispersed at the end of the meeting in decent spirits, and while it once more took a while before my raffle ticket number was called I did manage to pick up a second club T-shirt for posterity.
The agenda on the screen in the meeting room, though, left me with a first premonition the club president was soon explaining. As the group had warned a few meetings before, most of the executive had got to the point where they had to lay down the burden, and hardly anyone had offered to take their place. For that reason, the club was preparing to shut down; the silent auction was to sell off some of their video connection equipment. People kept explaining things were different now than they'd been when the club had been founded thirty years before with information readily available online; for that matter too, most of the people in the club did look as if they matched what some did say and could have been going to it since the beginning. (One older gentleman seated beside me during the meeting was playing Pokemon Go on his iPad, though.) I suppose I've not picked up on too many computer hints I was unaware of before, although I did make a presentation not that long ago about the iPad screen keyboard hints I'd stumbled on. It was rather just getting out once a month (save for summer and December) in a context different than work or church, and maybe a bit of thinking that asking for help online risks replies delivered with the curl of contempt "you shouldn't have upgraded in the first place" (although I can imagine that being proclaimed twenty-five years ago during the System 6-to-System 7 transition). Still, the group dispersed at the end of the meeting in decent spirits, and while it once more took a while before my raffle ticket number was called I did manage to pick up a second club T-shirt for posterity.