The Chaos of Retirement

 As some of you know, I do my articles a week in advance of when they're needed.Well last weekend I inadvertently became a bit busy, and so am relying on random documents for this weeks content. The problems last week do give an amusing story though, which will start after the documents.

This week I think I'll post the sales brochure for the BAC Swingfire missile. This was pretty early in development when they were still expecting there to be both an heavy and light version of the missile, alternatively named RACswing and INswing (Long and Medium Range respectively), denoting which branch of the British Army was to use it. This was dated 4th June 1964.

(Yes, that's a Swingfire mounted to a Saracen)

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Now onto last weeks fun and games! It all started a few months ago. I noticed that my old trusty PC has started to slow down, lag and the occasional crash. Some of the USB ports have stopped working and she's been through two house moves. She was also becoming incapable of running some programs. This PC has been with me for nearly a decade, all three of my books, and most of my articles and research have been done on her. So I decided it was time to retire her. I ordered a new PC, even managed to get a 3060 put in it (which is a hell of an upgrade from the GTX 660 in my old PC!). It arrives, and I figured Saturday morning that I could do a quick swap of the tower unit, spend a couple of hours battering all the useless crap that Windows includes out of it, and installing programs Etc. My Old PC would get moved to my Wife's desk, and likely only get turned on twice a month for a bit of gentle web surfing, a fitting retirement for the old girl.

First surprise, It's a lot bigger than I was expecting, I seem to have brought the equivalent of the black monolith from 2001. Then the issues started. My monitor is even older than my PC, dating from about 2009. The 3060 only has HDMI ports, my monitor had no idea what one of them was. 

I then head out to PC World to buy a new one, it's at this point things started to really go wonky. First the Highways Agency had decided to close the dual carriage way that was my best route. With the Diversion routed down a narrow city centre street. The traffic jam was rather impressive.

When I get to PC World, I find out it is click and collect only due to the pandemic. It'd be really embarrassing if part of my day job included checking shops to make sure they're obeying the CV19 regulations, such as click & collect wouldn't it? Things would be made even more embarrassing by my wife asking as I went out 'Are you sure they're open?'...

Anyway, I start browsing on the phone and every monitor is out of stock, eventually the lady on the door takes pity on my dumb ass and goes to see what they have in stock. So I order it, and head home, avoiding the closed road. Get home, get the monitor in place aaaaaand, no HDMI cable. So back to PC world I go. But it's all sorted now.