My Mistress spent hours, unsuccessfully trying to reinstall the printer on her computer. Everything she did wouldn’t work. She installed, she uninstalled, she reinstalled, she swore. Eventually she sat back from the problem and thought about it. Now in my experience, the time to do the thinking is at the start of an initiative rather than after a number of hours. If she had, she might have realised that on one attempt she had plugged a spare lead that was lying under the desk into the computer and there was no printer attached and on another occasion it was because the printer was connected through another device rather than directly. Once she’d sorted all those minor problems out, it was amazing how quickly the underlying problem was actually rectified. There is a moral in this story, but I’m going to leave my Mistress to work it out for herself.
Shadow, on the other paw, has utterly disgraced herself. Through this column she would like to issue an official apology to the people my master borrowed some books from about five years ago. Now firstly there is an apology along the lines of them having been waiting by our front door to be returned for the last three years. (I’m not joking). Now however, they are in no state ever to be returned. Shadow has had a bit of a munching and shredding spree and has partly devoured and partly left in tiny pieces the two books all over our hall floor. My Mistress is insisting that the least Shadow can do is clean up after herself but there seems to be a bit of an impasse at the moment, with Shadow refusing and the bits of book remaining on the hall floor. My mistress did at least throw pages 89 onwards into the bin, on the basis that no one wants to start a book that far through, particularly one with no back cover or any corners.