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Arts Training Central

I, Laptop

I’m a little laptop, short and stout. My life is hectic but happy, meeting a range of needs in a town centre office in Leicester.

I am based with a company called Arts Training Central, which supports the development needs of artists, performers and other arts practitioners, so there is no shortage of interesting (and sometimes unusual) people to meet and work with, and an endless variety of colourful information to process in one form or another.

I’m not your workaday computer, churning out office documents – far from it. In fact, I don’t mix with that sort of computer at all. My private room is shared only with one other laptop and a video recorder, where we are kept for the exclusive use of visiting clients.

My role is to be a versatile aid, addressing many of the issues which bring learners to our building: I am both a receiver and a transmitter of information; I am an aid to financial accounting; I help to produce documents; I can act as a training tool; and I am an invaluable source of information via the internet or my stock of CD Roms.

Typically I start the day by going through my mail. This can be considerable, although thanks to the miracle of electronic information I’m not reduced to the indignity of tearing open paper envelopes like the humans next door, and I can process messages quickly and efficiently. I read everything. Much of it comes from faraway users of laptops, updating me on their progress; from time to time a reply seems pertinent, so I call in Angela to send a note back.

From ten o’clock onwards I receive visitors. Some of them will be young dancers like Miriam or Claire, amending their CVs or writing funding applications with stylish software and printer. Others, like Andy, might ask me to transmit the occasional Email to his colleagues in Manchester.

We have a small collection of interactive CD training packages, and people regularly drop in to use them. Even though the campaign is finished, BBC Webwise is still very popular. I pay particular interest when a client does Webwise because I know they will be back one day soon to use the Internet live, like many others before them.

The Internet is big time with me, and every day we are finding details of new sites to support our artists, ranging from Netgain, which deals with "survival issues" relevant to people in the sector, through to on-line galleries and Digital film making tutor sites, alongside amazing pages produced groups such as Walsall Community Arts, or MACNAS in Galway. I am a free service to my users, and probably the only realistic way they can access these resources.

I mentioned I have a colleague. She sits facing me across the table, and does much the same sort of work. From time to time, usually on Thursday afternoons, Sally will use us in tandem for her two hour mini-seminars, usually based on the Excel spreadsheet which we both have, and which so many people find so difficult to adapt to at first; at other times we will join together for tutoring in the use of the Word package, or for a demonstration of a particular web site.

And there’s more. Another time I could tell you about Time Management, PowerPoint, Encarta, and the many other strings to my bow. For now it is probably enough to say that I am well used and highly valued, playing a small but important part in developing the cultural life of the City, and intending to carry on doing so for some time to come.

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