Technology know-how

Today I experienced the most intense feeling of job satisfaction I have had in a long time. When you spend much of your working life talking to very clever people about the extraordinarily clever things they have thought or done, it can make your own work seem rather futile. But I suspect even lots of these clever people would have failed to match today’s achievement. Even better, unlike a lot of work assignments, it had tangible results: I mended the printer. Ok, I didn’t exactly mend it so much as fish out the small piece of red balloon that had somehow got wedged in the paper feed, but seeing as the entire family had been struggling to fix it for nearly two weeks, I can’t imagine Gutenberg ever feeling more of a sense of triumph.
It all goes to show how a party for 15 six-year-olds can have repercussions long after the rustle of the last party bag has faded, especially as it wasn’t just the printer that suffered, there was also the incident with the vacuum cleaner.
In the frantic pre-party preparations, and while the kitchen floor was still covered in icing sugar and the hall carpet with flour, I somehow managed to suck up a sock. This wedged so firmly in the vacuum that all power of suction was lost, and the sock refused to come out, in spite of all kinds of lateral thinking. In fact, Mr Homework Mum became so obsessed with finding the killer scientific solution that I felt I should really be involving the kids in a kind of impromptu physics lesson about forces, and the effects of water on density rather than sticking them in front of the telly to avoid the Hoover hose Mr HM was powerfully swinging around his head. Even if the girls missed out on a learning opportunity, by the time we finally got the sock out (a mixture of water and swinging), I had learned all sorts of things – not least that if you stick a wire coathanger down a Hoover hose it will probably puncture it meaning its powers of suction are never quite the same again, and if you spend 45 minutes swinging a Hoover hose around your head before a party because of your partner’s incompetent cleaning methods, it doesn’t leave much time to cook cocktail sausages.