Final laptop of honour
Turning of the page. End of era. However you wish to phrase it at the conclusion of a seismic week in Irish football, it can only mean one thing: that’s right, your Irish Examiner Football Correspondent’s trusty laptop has given up the ghost.
That its last act should coincide with the end of Giovanni Trapattoni’s reign seems somehow fitting. After all, my faithful companion has achieved something of veteran status itself, having seen no less than three Irish football managers – Brian Kerr, Steve Staunton and now Trap – through the exit door in its time. Already filled to the brim with manager-speak, I can only conclude that a surfeit of Trappish simply blew its tiny little electronic mind and finally tipped it over the edge.
In any event, the end was not pretty. Back from Vienna, where it had performed its usual solid professional service on another night of doom and gloom for Irish football, it managed to survive another long shift at the Clarion Hotel at Dublin Airport as Trap’s departure unfolded on Wednesday.
But the effort clearly took its toll and, by yesterday, I was concerned enough to bring the old boy to the laptop hospital where, over the course of its inordinately long life, it had already undergone the computer equivalent of brain, heart and lung transplants and yet somehow always managed to confound expert prognosis by living to write another day.
This time, I’m afraid, the situation looks terminal. Or at least so I’m inclined to deduce from the open-mouthed look of horror on the face of the tech doc when it took him only the most cursory examination of the patient’s condition to ascertain its entrails were clearly visible where the top of the keyboard should have been. Nor, I have to say, did the doc’s mood improve much when, almost as an afterthought, I reached deep into the bag and – with a bashful “you might be needing this too” — handed over the ‘on/off’ button.
No, even I – a computer illiterate of quite staggering incompetence – can recognise that when a laptop has to be conveyed across a counter in two separate pieces, there’s a fair to middling possibility something is seriously awry.
When I first started in this business, some 135 years ago, the old notebook and blower were still the cutting edge way to do your reporting in the field. My first close encounter with the portable technology came at the 1994 World Cup in America, for which the Sunday Press had furnished me with a big, lumbering, whirring beastie called a Tandy.
The thing did its job, no question about that, but the already seasoned model in my possession turned out to be disturbingly susceptible to alterations in temperature and humidity. This peculiar eccentricity emerged over the course of one long, steamy night in a Ramada Inn in Orlando – stop giggling at the back of the class, please – when I found that having the air conditioning on in the room somehow caused the keys to depress as if sitting in treacle. Since this rather put a halt to my literary gallop – a man can only wait so long for the letter ‘a’ he has pressed to appear on the screen – I had no other option but to cut the air-con, throw open the window and spend the wee hours sitting in my underpants bathed in sweat while lashing out the latest crucial news on someone or other’s suspected groin strain.
Ah, the glamour of the sports writing gig.
Mind, there were other colleagues new to the portable computer beat who never even got that far. The story is cherished of the veteran who, bitterly complaining about the bloody uselessness of the new technology, brought a laptop back into the office for repair after taking it to a game for the very first time. It was only when the in-house tech wizard pointed out that the machine was cracked from end to end, that the hack was obliged to admit he had used it as a cushion to sit on because his seat in the press box was wet.
Now, as I wait for what I fear will be the inevitable call asking for my consent to pull the plug on my own dear old laptop, it suddenly dawns on me that maybe it wasn’t all that’s gone before which brought on its demise but, rather, the fear of what might be to come.
I’m referring to the grim possibility that, if Martin O’Neill’s appointment as the new Ireland manager turns to be less “nailed on” than Mick McCarthy and everyone else seems to think, we could be in for one of those protracted managerial succession sagas which, as we know from previous bitter experience, has the capacity to break the best of minds, never mind the best of machines.
But that, I suppose I’m bound to say, is in the laptop of the gods.
