........ please little minds.
(And, as my granddad used to say, little pants fit little behinds.)
Don't spoil a ship for a happerth of tar, is another one he said often, but I'm not going to spoil this polemic by trying to explain its historical significance.
Look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves. Substitute cents and dollars or ringgit, and I'm sure you'll get the point. Think pointillism, wherein the whole depends on the combination of tiny dots and the spaces in-between.
Pointillism is a style of painting in which small distinct points of primary colors create the impression of a wide selection of secondary colors. The technique relies on the perceptive ability of the eye and mind of the viewer to mix the color spots into a fuller range of tones.
Color television receivers and computer screens use tiny dots of primary red, green, and blue to render color, and can thus be regarded as a kind of pointillism.
So every little thing counts for something, and, if you fancy yourself as a bit of an artist you can practice it here.
On Thursday I went up to Mangga Dua to my computer consultants and they erased, literally, the dirt from a connection and I then went in search of a power supply adaptor for the external hard drive I keep my collection of music on. Power was going in but not coming out.
In the entire mall devoted to electronic goods, not one adaptor could be found, not one. The solution? Buy a new casing because that had an adaptor, a different one. And the cost was out of all proportion to my basic need.
Why? I asked. If a shoe lace snaps do I have to buy a new pair of shoes? If a button comes off my shirt, should I throw my shirt away?
The simple answer is yes; taps (faucets to my American readers) regularly leak, but you have to buy a new one rather than taking it to bits and inserting a rubber washer. But I do know a guy on a pedestrian bridge in West Jakarta who sells laces.
My father had a row of shelves along the walls of the garage he built at the bottom of our London garden. These shelves were lined with used tobacco tins in which he kept, carefully sorted nails, screws and other small stuff, such as tap washers and grommets, which one day he would find useful. Or maybe not, but who can foretell a need?I keep bits of this and that too: scraps of knowledge, notes of bon mots which I may yet find a use for in Jakartass. For example, if at first you don't succeed, don't try sky diving.
Everything has a value, except it seems in the mall-ignorant world of consumerism. Disposable incomes are wasted on non-disposable, and often non-recyclable, waste. We are told repeatedly that our finite resources are being used up at a rate which is so fast that alternatives have yet to be found or developed. So surely we all have to do our bit, however small and insignificant that may be.
So if you're interested in a power supply unit, model no: 26W-12-5, which lets power in and stops it coming out, then drop me a line or check out FreeCycle-Jakarta.
