Conversations

“Finished with the comp?” she asks.

“Yes.” I reply

“Put up your next post, have you?”

“No.”

“No? Then what did you do?!!”

“Read other bloggers’ posts and felt guilty.”

“Serves you right. Hope the guilt kills you.”

“I see. Well, I just decided I haven’t finished with the comp. Not yet.”

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Last week a friend was here for a few days. He had some time before his next term started, so he flew over from Ireland. We spoke – or rather, he spoke, while I listened – of many things: of days in Hyderabad (where he spent most of his childhood), of life in the CIEFL campus (where his dad, an English professor, acted with other colleagues in plays staged for the CIEFL community, and where he, as a kid, read Hansel & Gretel for a programme aired on the UGC), and life now in Ireland (where he sometimes visited friends who owned sheep which ran all over the place and refused to get back in after grazing despite his earnest and exhausting efforts, after which the dogs were let out and he watched with disbelief as they barked and hounded the sheep until they fell in line and walked back obediently into their enclosures).

His CIEFL days reminded me of my younger days, the times spent with families my parents socialised with, the uncles, aunties and their kids whom I played and fought with, the picnics and parties we attended, the movie-weekends we spent together and so on. And I could not dismiss the thought that kept coming back: how different the times are now.

It was the aspect of socialising that interested me most. Back then, dad used to come home around 6 pm and we would go out often, either shopping or to meet friends. If we stayed back, chances were good that someone dropped in home. There was constant activity, and the chatter never seemed to end. These days, the evenings seem to offer little time and energy for such activities (And on the rare occasions I get back at 6 pm, the abundance of time available sometimes makes me feel disoriented – for a while I’m unable to decide what to do, although I know that there is a lot to be done and that this extra time is such a blessing.)

We earn much more than our parents did during those days, and the work is good too, but most of life revolves around aspects surrounding work. Even when we find time to socialise, we do so with people in the software field (a lot of them are colleagues), and conversation often leads to topics related to office or software (and when it doesn’t it means the men are talking about cars or some new electronic gadget, while the women are exchanging recipes or discussing the merits of following Atkins’ diet).

I cannot help thinking about the families we interacted with many years ago in Kathmandu. Ravi Uncle worked at the Indian Consulate, Ramu Uncle worked with the Geological Survey of India, Venkataramiah Uncle was a professor of Psychology, Anand Sir was a teacher at the Central School I studied in, Mini aunty’s husband (I miss his name) was an ex-pilot, and my dad was an engineer – imagine the conversations such a motley crowd could have!

New times bring in new possibilities; these days I read blogs. And although they cannot be substitutes for real-life conversations, they open windows into other people’s lives and offer a chance to know – and sometimes interact with – people from different backgrounds. Alpha designs roads, Leela is in advertising, Patrix is an architect and public-policy expert, Rash and Anita are journalists, Hekate is (or was?) an ‘Instructional Designer’ – I shouldn’t really be complaining, should I?

A language affair

The first German word I came across was one I was to encounter frequently in the years to come, but rarely put to use.

It was in 1998, when I had recently joined a German multinational in Bangalore. Among my colleagues were a few who had returned after short assignments in Germany. They spoke of the autobahns, described blondes with skimpy summer tops, showed pictures of snow-covered streets and houses, and every once in a while uttered something I gathered later to be Scheisse. What does it mean, I asked one of them when I could no longer sustain my curiosity. What does it mean, that word you keep uttering now and then when your program does not work the way you intend it to? Oh that one, came the reply, that quite simply means Shit. I prefer, continued this colleague, the German word over its English counterpart because it does not end abruptly but trails endlessly, carrying my frustration farther away each time.

In early 2000 when I was assigned to a project in Germany, my vocabulary did not extend beyond a few scattered phrases, containing words I was wary of using beyond my circle of programmers. In Germany I enrolled, along with a few other Indian colleagues, into the course we were eligible for. Our teacher, Alex, surely must have been perplexed by the sheer variety of sounds our class produced – to him we were all Indians, but amongst us were a Bengali, a Tamilian, an Andhraite, and a Kannadiga. The umlauts pronounced by each acquired a distinct character, and after a few sessions of trying to mend our ways, Alex gave up and moved on to less vocal aspects of the language.

As the course progressed my colleagues dropped out one after the other, citing reasons surrounding work, and towards the end the classes were between only Alex and I. It was during this period, when we chatted well beyond the class, that I learnt Alex was a student of English literature. (But, he told me, we study English literature in German, through translated works). He was curious about India, a land whose impression he had obtained from E.M.Forster’s A passage to India, one of the novels he had to study in his course. It took a while to explain to him that things were very different now, and it ignited in him a desire to visit the country. I also told him about more recent works of Indian literature, and the day before I was to return back to India I met him with a small gift in hand – Rohinton Mistry’s A fine balance. He thanked me and proceeded to pull out a cover from his bag, which he said contained his gift for me. The bundle contained A passage to India (in English), and a few sheets that looked like copies of some study material. He said they included copies of a few critical studies (in English) of this novel, and also his own thesis (in German) on the novel. My eyes lit up seeing all that, and I promised to send him my impressions on the novel.

Eight months later I relocated to Germany, and although for over two years I picked up very little of the language, there grew within me an association of the sounds, the accents and the mannerisms of people speaking German to elements of surrounding life in Germany. I wasn’t aware how strong this association was until one day, seated on board a Lufthansa flight at Cincinnati on my way back to Germany after four weeks in the US – four weeks of constantly hearing the verbose Americans air their thoughts and opinions – I heard the voice of the flight attendant on the speaker welcoming passengers aboard and wishing them a pleasant flight, in German. Those syllables were music to my ears; I felt I was going home.

The medium used at work was English, and that gave me and other foreign nationals little opportunity to practice the local language. Then, about an year ago, an informal “rule” introduced on our team led to the usage of German as the predominant form of communication – oral and written – which in turn acted as catalyst in our learning process simply due to the volume of German we encountered – and continue to encounter – each day.

It is difficult to put into words the feeling that passes through someone who discovers that sentences which seemed to make little sense until then had turned, all of a sudden, much more transparent and could be easily understood. After months of struggling to get a foothold, after countless occasions when concentration lapsed due to the sheer effort needed to maintain an overview of what was being spoken, when one day you become aware that you do understand a lot with little effort, it is as if someone had placed a Babel fish into your ear. On the radio the broadcasts seem familiar and discernable, on TV you begin to laugh at the comedy shows, your elderly neighbour seems more communicative that you thought she was, and suddenly a new world opens out, waiting for you to step in and participate.

In reality, the acquisition of language skills is gradual and most of it happens without our noticing it, until one day we become aware of how much we actually know. Then it seems to have happened all in that instant, and such an instant is a magical moment, a moment you do not wish to let go of. There occur many such moments during the course of learning a language – as one passes through different levels of understanding – each spurring you on to move further to a higher level, towards a deeper understanding of an alien culture.

It is difficult, however, to sustain this magical moment for long. Every now and then you come upon a word you haven’t heard of, and this little word robs you of the meaning of a sentence you had been following perfectly well all along. If you are reading, you can refer to a dictionary, but if you are listening to someone, the sentence is lost forever.

These days there are times when I stand outside bookstores and look longingly at German titles adorning the glossy paperbacks on display. Someday, I tell myself, I will be able to walk into such a store, just as I would walk into an English bookstore today, pick up books of my choice, turn their pages and enter, with effortless ease, the universe contained within.

Reasons

Pages of a diary,
words and pictures,
reveal.

The spaces in between,
those unwritten pages,
conceal.

An imbalance in work-life?
A broken Internet line?
A painful root canal?
An unsettled mind?

Pages of a diary,
well-thought sentences,
conceal.

The spaces in between,
those transparent gaps,
reveal.

From The small book of Atomic Absurdities

Recollections

Certain thoughts of a certain person are troubling me. For some reason, the mind recollects the last few passages of a book read long ago. I walk to the bookshelf in the study and pull out the book, An Intimate History of Humanity. It is dusty, uncared for. I begin to read:

Half a minute is enough to transform an apparently ordinary person into an object of hatred, an enemy of humanity. He committed a murder and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Then in his desolate jail, half a minute was enough to transform him again, into a hero. He saved a man’s life and was pardoned. But when he got home he found his wife living with someone else and his daughter knew nothing of him. He was unwanted, so he decided that he might as well be dead.

His attempt at suicide was also a failure. A monk summoned to his bedside said to him, ‘Your story is terrifying, but I can do nothing for you. My own family is wealthy, but I gave up my inheritance and I have nothing but debts. I spend everything I have finding homes for the homeless. I can give you nothing. You want to die, and there is nothing to stop you. But before you kill yourself, come and give me a hand. Afterwards, you can do what you like.’

Those words changed the murderer’s world. Somebody needed him: at last he was no longer superfluous and disposable. He agreed to help. And the world was never the same again for the monk, who had been feeling overwhelmed by the amount of suffering around him, to which all his efforts were making only a minute difference. The chance encounter with the murderer gave him an idea which was to shape his whole future: faced by a person in distress, he had given him nothing, but asked something from him instead. The murderer later said to the monk: ‘If you had given me money, or a room, or a job, I would have restarted my life of crime and killed someone else. But you needed me.’ That was how Abbe Pierre’s movement for the very poor was born, from an encounter of two totally different individuals who lit up a light in each other’s heart. These two men were not soul-mates in the ordinary, romantic meaning of that word, but each owes the other the sense of direction which guides their life today.

It is in the power of everybody, with a little courage, to hold out a hand to someone different, to listen, and to attempt to increase, even by a tiny amount, the quantity of kindness and humanity in the world…

I recollect that these words – at the end of a deeply thought-provoking book – had had a profound effect upon me. No purpose can be nobler than the purpose of giving, I had concluded. And that had resolved, in part, the intractable question of life’s purpose.

I place the book back on the shelf. I might need it another day.

Framing reality

At college, I often spent my evenings on the hostel terrace, reading or listening to music. Ashwin joined me sometimes, with a book or his guitar. One such evening we sat through sunset into the night, watching the clouds slowly reveal a beautiful full moon.

“It’s just like a painting…” I said, looking at the horizon.

Then, almost instantly, we looked at each other and laughed at the silliness of that statement. Comparing the beauty of reality with an imitation – it showed how little of reality we observe, and how much we surround ourselves with imitations or reflections.

Often, we miss out on the beauty that surrounds us due to lack of focus – there is too much detail around us, and unless something extraordinarily beautiful catches our attention we fail to focus on the beauty in the details. Framing a portion of reality – through a painting or photograph – helps us look at a single aspect by filtering out surrounding detail.

claw_back

We’ve taken many walks along that riverside of Rhein at Speyer, and each time I see the statue that sometimes looks like a bird and sometimes like a giant claw reaching out to pluck something out of thin air. Last time, on a clear evening, I photographed it.

Framing reality enhances it, sometimes. And when that happens, you know you have a good photograph.

claw

Translating a dream

Last Monday, at the hospital, on many occasions we had to sit and wait outside a doctor’s cabin. There was no book to read, so I spent time looking around at the various things stuck on the wall. They were mostly sketches and paintings by children, and on one occasion I also found a poem:

Gedicht

Tür auf
Einer raus
Einer rein
Vierter sein

Tür auf
Einer raus
Einer rein
Dritter sein

Tür auf
Einer raus
Einer rein
Zweiter sein

Tür auf
Einer raus
Einer rein
Nächster sein

Tür auf
Einer raus
Selber rein
TagHerrDoktor!

Loosely translated, this is what the lines conveyed:

Poem

Door opens
Someone out
Someone in
Fourth in line

Door opens
Someone out
Someone in
Third in line

Door opens
Someone out
Someone in
Second in line

Door opens
Someone out
Someone in
Next in line

Door opens
Someone out
Myself in
GoodDay Doctor!

I kept staring at the poem for a long time. The kids could play a game along these lines, I thought. And as I tried to find an appropriate English translation I was reminded of a desire I’ve had for some time now – to translate some works of Indian literature into German.

Translation interests me for different reasons. The process of translating a work involves getting into the details of a work at a depth one would not normally reach while reading it. It demands intimacy with two languages, with two cultures. And it is important – transcribing elements of one culture into another through literature is a valuable means of cultural dissemination.

This dream has remained dormant for a while; perhaps the time has come to take it up seriously and work on it. It is clear where I must begin: with German (my knowledge of which is still rudimentary) – a channel for cultural immersion in a society where knowledge of the English language is limited and its use sparse.

It will be years before I attempt to write in German in a public journal, so you may gently cast aside all doubts about encountering – in this space, in the near future – sentences in a tongue you cannot decipher.

Medicinal thoughts

If one spends eleven hours in a hospital it surely isn’t just another day, and it merits a journal entry. I’m just going to scribble down some thoughts that ran through my mind as the day progressed.

Background: wife was ill; she was treated by a local doctor, but had symptoms that necessitated further checks. We reached the hospital around 10:30 am.

The lady at counter found it difficult (using the system) to register our case, due to some reason. She cursed the system. I sympathized with her; computers are not easy to use. Ask my mother.

Medicine is a lot like an elimination game – using the symptoms, find out possible causes, and through tests eliminate one cause after another until a test reveals the actual cause. In our case, the actual cause was not found at all. After eleven hours of hopping from one department to another, we left for home with the information that nothing was wrong with my wife. On one hand it was good to know that there was no serious problem, but on the other, it left the puzzle unresolved. Why did the symptoms occur, then?

This nature of medicine is what permits – in simple cases – Expert Systems to substitute for humans. Using a database and a set of rules, a system could have prescribed the tests and also come to the conclusions (based on the test results) that the doctors arrived at today. (Of course I’m oversimplifying, and this is an outsider’s picture from someone who doesn’t know anything about medicine. But the day’s events revealed this side of medicine).

Every test that was done needed equipment of such sophistication that it left me dazed. And the glue between the different machines was software that permitted controlling all that complexity. Just being there, watching all those systems being used to determine aspects crucial to the diagnosis, emphasized the huge importance of software working well – one system failure at such a place and who knows what the consequence could be. The social value of software cannot be over-estimated.

The hospital staff did a marvellous job of co-ordinating our case between the different departments. At one stage, when one test (in Neurology) was held up due to results that were awaited (from ENT), they scheduled another test that could be done in the meantime (in yet another department).

I saw more technology today than what my grandmother would have seen in her whole life. Yet, I couldn’t help wondering if her own remedies would have been enough to handle symptoms my wife was experiencing.

If the test results had been different, so would my conclusions about the day.

Flip-Flop

It happened on our way back from Frankfurt airport.

We had been to the airport to drop a friend of Paru’s mother, who stayed with us during the weekend and was now returning to India. Paru was quite fond of this aunty – she had pleasant childhood memories of times the two families spent together – and she was sad aunty was leaving.

It was a working day, and I wanted to get to office soon. The drive to Frankfurt took about an hour, and I hoped we could drop aunty and get back by around 10 am. I was wrong.

Aunty had excess baggage – she shopped to her heart’s content while in Europe – and Paru was worried she would be penalized for it. She had prepared aunty for this eventuality, and we hoped that by going early she could be among the first to check-in and hence stand a good chance of her entire luggage being accepted.

We reached the airport three hours before the flight departure-time, and found that the Air India counter would open only an hour later. Aunty suggested we leave, saying she would manage on her own. Without displaying the slightest of hesitation, I accepted. Paru didn’t say anything either.

We said our goodbyes, and before we left aunty asked us how she could reach us “if there was an emergency”. We told her how to dial our mobile number without the country-code, and pointed to the pink-colored telephone booths nearby. Then, we left.

It was a bit odd, leaving her like that, but I told myself not to get emotional about the matter. Paru was feeling very uneasy, I could see it.

“She doesn’t have any Euros with her.” Paru said.

“She has a credit card isn’t it? She’ll manage.” I replied.

We walked to the car park, paid for the parking, and drove out of the airport. The uneasiness lingered.

“We should have stayed back, isn’t it?” Paru asked.

“Probably. But there’s no point thinking about it now, is there?”

We were on the auto-bahn, and the traffic wasn’t as heavy as it was in the other direction. I focused on the road.

“It is a very Indian thing.” I said. “This habit of staying back until the train or flight leaves.”

“We are Indians.”

“I know, but what I meant was that it is a cultural thing, which is done for the sake of tradition. We need to be more practical and let go of such traditions, at times.”

Paru didn’t reply. The silence was unbearable. I switched the radio on.

“Could you turn it off, please?”

I turned it off.

“I’ll keep worrying about what happened with her luggage until I hear from her after she lands in India.” She said. “I wish we’d stayed back at least until she checked-in her luggage.”

I didn’t reply. The traffic in the opposite direction had eased; most people had already reached their workplaces. After a while, I spoke again.

“Shall we turn back?”

She turned towards me.

“I’m serious. We’ve driven for about 15 minutes now, so in another 15-20 minutes we should be back at the airport, which would give us some time before the counter opens.”

She took a while to reply.

“You don’t mind?”

“No.”

“We can work a little late in office today isn’t it?”

“Absolutely. So shall we take this exit?”

We took the exit, entered a small town, and turned back towards the auto-bahn in the direction of Frankfurt. Soon we were driving in the opposite direction. Paru seemed relieved, and relaxed.

“Shall I switch on the radio?”

She smiled.

“I never knew that the direction we’re driving in could make such a difference to your mood!”

She gave a bigger smile.

As we drove back to the airport, a couple of streams of thought were running through my mind.

Firstly, the change in direction of driving. One moment we were going one way, the way we had planned, and the next we were going in the opposite direction – a change triggered by a momentary exchange. We would now have a totally different experience: encounter different cars, meet different people, see different sights. What did it mean? I like to think – or be under the illusion – that I’m in control of what I’m doing and where I’m going, and such events where “something else” seems to be in control leaves me intrigued and uncomfortable. It was as if my life branched into two, one going the way back home, and the other towards Frankfurt.

Secondly, the change in direction of thought. What made me change my mind and decide to go back? Was it because I didn’t want Paru to feel uneasy the whole day thinking about what would have happened to aunty and her luggage? Or was it because I didn’t want to face the guilt upon learning that aunty really needed our help at the airport? Either way, my decision was based on something to do with Paru and me, rather than genuine concern for auntie’s welfare. And that didn’t feel too good.

We reached the airport, parked the car, took the elevator, walked towards the lounge – throughout experiencing a strange feeling of “we were here just a little while ago”, a feeling that wasn’t really deja vu, but a sense of being part of a movie that was controlled by someone else who was playing with us just as an editor plays around with parts of the film, replaying bits and re-arranging snippets – so we walked towards the departure lounge and found aunty walking towards an escalator.

She had checked her luggage in – with no problems, Thank God, she said – and she was very surprised to see us. Paru explained how worried she had been, and aunty was moved.

“So typical of you!” she said to Paru, giving her a warm hug. “But you shouldn’t have worried – I would have managed.”

We spent some more time talking to aunty before leaving. On our drive back, I thought again about how we should have been on that stretch of the road not at that moment but some time back. I then knew I would be writing about this episode, even this very sentence about knowing I would write all this, and you would be reading it, and probably reflecting over it and talking about it with someone….. all these triggered by that one moment where something within me decided I would change direction – flip-flop.

Automation blues

System failures often lead to comical situations. I was in a queue at the office canteen counter, having picked-up my pretzel and orange juice for breakfast, when the computer that was used for billing stopped working. It simply “hung”, and then the system restarted (I could see Windows XP starting up). The lady at the counter, trained at nothing more than pressing large icons on the touch screen, had little idea on how to proceed. As the queue grew longer she turned progressively jittery, until a colleague came to her rescue by suggesting we all move to a counter nearby.

The queue moved (it was a bit like a train of people moving in unison, each one with their bananas, croissants, apples, sandwiches, fruit-salads, juices – the Breakfast Express, if you like) and the lady came behind this new counter, only to find that this system was not turned on at all.

It took a while for the counter to start functioning again, and by then the queue was so long that the security guard came around to see what the problem was. Some people were amused, some were not. The poor lady at the counter was still bemused.

It is a tricky thing, automating processes like these. To the end user – people buying snacks at a counter – it seems quite unnecessary: the transaction is very simple and hardly seems to justify anything more than a cash register at the counter. Why have a computer here? The reasons are not so apparent: there may be a need to store all transactions digitally (as a company policy) and it may also be useful to gather statistics (to plan inventory).

While it is nice, in general, to have a manual process that works as a backup for the automated one, this becomes quite crucial in areas where the end user sees no direct benefits of automation. You may tolerate a system delay at an airport booking counter (it is difficult to imagine a world without computerized ticketing systems), but if the same happens at a bakery in your neighborhood, you’d seriously consider baking your own bread.

Digital Dilemma

Every picture may tell a story, but there are stories behind the pictures too, ones that could have led to a very different set of pictures. Simply put, we could have ended up returning from Venice without most of those nice photos.

The constraints of memory

A week before we left for Venice, we decided to buy a new digital camera. We already had a pocket-sized digital camera, and our earlier plan was to carry it in addition to our bigger SLR camera that used film. Then, after discussing the pros and cons of upgrading our SLR to a digital one (with which we could still use the lenses of the old SLR), we decided to go ahead.

So with three days to go, we bought the Canon Digital Rebel.

Digital cameras come with a price (apart from being pricey in the empty-your-pocket kind of way): you need to be equipped with enough storage capacity to last the length of your stay. Our usual strategy with the older digital camera was to carry our laptop on long trips, and upload photos to the laptop before emptying the memory card for a fresh round of photos. This time, as our luck would have it, the new camera’s software refused to work with the laptop (it worked with our desktop, however). We had purchased a memory card that could carry around 150 photos, which, by our estimates, was not enough for even two days at Venice.

So on the day of the trip, a few hours before we left, we bought a compact hard-drive into which we could insert our memory card and store our photos. It was a flimsy looking device with an LCD display that indicated the file transfer from card to hard-drive. The transfer of files from this hard-drive to our computer could not be tested – we had no time on our hands – so when we left we were feeling rather uneasy about our decision to go completely digital so late. What if the photos we transfer to this hard-drive cannot be retrieved?

I decided on a backup strategy: at the end of each day we would transfer all photos from the memory card into the hard drive, but instead of emptying the memory card we would retain the best photos in the card and delete the rest. This would leave us, at the end of the trip, with at least 150 good photographs (which was the capacity of the card), even if the hard drive refused to work when we got back.

The idea sounded reasonable, but it had some interesting consequences. At the end of the first day, I deleted all but 25 photos. After day two, I had 50 “good” photos preserved in the card. Now that meant on day three there was space to take only 100 more photos! We exhausted the limit before day three ended, so I had to fish out the hard drive in the middle of a bridge, transfer from the card to the hard-drive, and then clean up the not-so-good ones from the card before we could go ahead and take more photographs.

As the days went by, I had to be more ruthless in deleting as many as possible and retain only the “masterpieces” (relative to the other ordinary ones). I also had to stop more and more often to perform the transfer-and-delete operation.

The deletion was not always easy – amongst the photos were many taken by my wife. I had to be objective, of course, but since different people have different notions of beauty there was a good chance that what I found a candidate for deletion was thought to be otherwise by my wife. Fortunately, she let me do as I wanted.

The last day left us with space for only around 25 photos. We spent a lot of time that day simply absorbing things around us without worrying about the best possible angle to capture something.

In the end the strategy turned out unnecessary – the hard-drive worked well and we were able to retrieve all of the 700 odd photos we took in Venice. And some of the ones I had deleted turned out better than the ones I had retained. “So much for your objectivity and aesthetic sense”, I almost heard my wife saying.

The auto power-off mystery

Very early on our trip, I noticed a strange behaviour of our new digital camera: every now and then the camera would shut its power off on its own.

My first guess was that it had something to do with the auto power-off setting, which could be set at different intervals (or even switched off completely). I verified the setting – it was at a comfortable two minutes, which was fine with me. I let it be.

Along the drive to Venice, when my wife was at the steering wheel, I would try to capture elements of the surrounding scenery whenever possible. On a few occasions, during the short window of time where I had to click, I found the camera off. I was almost sure there hadn’t been a gap of two minutes since the time I used it last.

After a while this got a little frustrating; I decided to probe further. It was clear that the auto power-off was not functioning normally. Further, I had noticed another curious aspect: once in a while the camera would switch on automatically, as if the power-off was a temporary phase. Was there a pattern in this strange behaviour?

There seemed to be a pattern, I thought. The interval between the camera switching itself off and then coming on automatically seemed to coincide with the auto power-off interval that was set. I decided to verify this: I set the auto power-off interval to four minutes, and waited for it to switch itself off. That happened soon, and I noted the time on my watch. Then, four minutes later I lifted the camera to check if it had come on, and as I had expected, it switched on before my eyes! I tested this behaviour again by setting the interval to two minutes, and the pattern repeated itself.

I told my wife we had received a freaky piece of equipment, with an inverted power-off logic programmed into it. She didn’t believe me; she thought I hadn’t learned how to use the camera.

After we switched driving-seats she tried it and fared no better – the camera went off and came on irregularly (and I allowed myself a short laugh). But even my hypothesis about the inverted logic failed when she tested it – there seemed to be no correlation between the setting and the time intervals with which the camera went off and came on.

Initial frustration slowly turned to resignation; we decided to make do with whatever photos we could capture when the power was on.

It was during lunch on the first day at Venice that I decided to take a closer look at the troubleshooting section of our camera manual. (The first attempt had revealed nothing more than some description about the auto power-off setting, but I wanted to check again). It was a bit of a struggle deciphering the contents of the German instruction manual, but after a while I came upon a point that seemed promising: check whether the battery compartment has been shut properly, it suggested.

I turned the camera over and gave the cover of the battery compartment a gentle push. There was a small click. My heart almost leaped.

The loose battery compartment cover turned out to be the cause behind all the unpredictable off and on behaviour. It also explained why my initial tests surrounding my theory had worked: after the time interval I had set passed and I lifted the camera to check if it had automatically come on, I probably put enough pressure on the battery compartment lid to ensure an electrical contact that resulted in the camera receiving power from the battery. If you are looking for something, chances are good you’ll find it.

The episode reminded me of what I sometimes hear at my workplace, when developers are irritated by customers who report trivial issues: always read the f***ing manual!