My life is a simple one, in a professional sense of the word, anyway.
I make people laugh in return for money. An unusual transaction and not an essential one, like being a surgeon – but there is a demand for laughs and since I have jokes and stories…
But this does not mean my professional life is not complicated.
This week is a good example. Ahead of publishing my new novel (later in the year) (June, probably) with great aplomb and enormous success, I need to embrace technology.
With this in mind, Nikki booked me on to a remedial course at our local Apple store and I duly went along.
Having four children myself, I might have realised that it is half term and that cunning parents might be looking for ways to offload their out-of-school children.
Arriving at the Apple store, it is just opened and is largely empty. Just the staff standing round, all tattoos and hats – but for one table in the corner which is full of kids and one spare seat. I don’t have time for embarrassment so I take my seat, mustard keen in a way that I wasn’t at school.
As a class, we make an odd site. I look like either an incredibly slow learner or worse, a deviant. And paranoid perhaps, but when mums’ arrive at the end of class, I think I spy some worried looks.
I look back assuredly – I am not a deviant – and I can prove it because I have my laptop with me – please, feel free to browse my hard-drive. The only thing on the hard-drive that embarrasses me are my book sales figures of previous novels I have published – which is why I am here in the first place.
Still with technology and later this week, I am home alone with Nikki and the boys away – and I take an enormous leap and make an incredible breakthrough by recording my first ever podcast.
I use my phone to make the recording and then I go to transfer the video from my phone to my laptop – only the file is too big!
Erm…
But determined and undeterred, I discover another route – a way to publish the video directly from my phone to YouTube. I click the required buttons but looking at the icon on my phone and the distance it has to travel from left to right and the speed it is moving, I realise that I will need to be patient and so will my legions of YT fans (all 652 of them!).
I am not known for my patience but this is a new me, so I make a cup of tea – and might watch a film while my phone labours on, on my behalf.
This is not a boast – but in the Holland household, we have two large and ultra-modern TV sets, each with hundreds of channels and services – all of which I pay for.
I gather together the 8 remote controls that are strewn under various sofas and to my horror, I am unable to turn either of the televisions on.
This is not an exaggeration for comic effect. One screen says SOURCE, the other INCORRECT DATA SOURCE and I have no young people I can appeal to. Bloody TV – I used to appear on the thing and now I can’t even turn it on.
I skulk off to bed to read – and at lights out, my phone still has 4/5’s of its journey to go.
In the middle of the night and up for one of my regular pees, it is barely half way.
But in the morning, success.
My phone states, Video Uploaded to YOUTUBE.
A proud moment for me.
Finally, I am a YOUTUBER!
But which YouTube channel quickly becomes the question? Because it is nowhere to be seen on my account.
Damn it. The conspiracy against me, continues.
I am completely vanquished and laid low and I do not try again. Too painful. I will wait for my 14 year old to get home and I will ask him… politely.
And you’d think that writing a novel is the hard part of on-line publishing.
Think again.
I,Gabriel coming soon… hopefully!
