On Laptop of the Word

I love GoodGym for many reasons. I love the feeling of helping out, making a difference to people’s lives and knowing that you’ve done something bloody brilliantly. I love the people I’ve met and the friends I’ve made. I love the cake and the curries. But I also love the fact what when someone asks me what I’m up to this weekend, I can sincerely reply with ‘I’m trimming a lady’s bush and tonight I’m helping a man with his dongle’.

Which was exactly what this mission was - Mr R was the recipient of a shiny new laptop and a fancy dongle to go with it. I am in no way adept with technology. I can work my phone and I know that if something isn’t working, that you try turning it off and on again. But I’ve never set up a laptop or a dongle before. Another reason I love GoodGym - I can rise to the challenge and achieve things I’ve never done before (like putting up curtains, or weeding, which I am basically a professional at now).

I arrived at Mr R’s on Thursday evening slightly soggy (thanks great British weather), and he showed me through to the technology at ask. Clever Lucy was able to turn on the computer, and I was even able to teach Mr R how to push the button to turn it on. A successful start. We managed to get the laptop going and an account running, and the next job was the dongle. Personally I’d always thought that a dongle was a you-know-what, but everyday is a school day, and I got to grips with the small black USB port.

Challenge one was working out how to open it. Luckily for me, Mr R had a short attention span, and was easily distracted by tiny pianos and the tiny seahorse he had purchased that day from a charity shop... thus he wasn’t aware of me struggling with putting the SIM card in. Not SIMple. Once that was done, between us we set up the mobile account and the glorious message popped up ‘YOUR SIM WILL BE READY TO WORK IN 2 HOURS’. We had hardly started the task, and we had already reached an invisible obstacle.

We decided that rather than hanging around for that time, it would be better off getting the task going at a later date. Mr R explained that he was really keen to get online, and the referrer of the task was on leave for the next few weeks. Having hardly done any work, I agreed to come back later. And that I did. I returned in drier fashion, and when we stuck the dongle into the dongle hole, it started to flash blue, and not green, like before. Progress!

However, this was the most progress we made. For love nor money could I get the internet to work. Cue frantic googling of ‘how to get my dongle going’. Mr R, again, was busy going through guitars and lampshades, and I could use my best acting skills to pretend I knew exactly what I was doing... Thankfully, in the end, it was as easy as changing from an S server to Windows 10 to enable the correct app to be downloaded and the dongle to work. Honestly, so straightforward...

And we were online! Hooray. It was time for Lucy’s Guide to Using the Internet, and between us we were able to tick all the things needed off the list. Bookmark a few select pages, tick. Google spellings, tick. Pretend to book a holiday leaving tomorrow to Nice, click! We even managed to get on Microsoft word, which is much more all singing all dancing and spangly than I know, and actually autocorrected all my blatant spelling mistakes, which pleased Mr R. I left Mr R to it, with the job of having a good old play around with his new dongle and computer.