Chinese sayings: 44 (瞎貓碰到死老鼠 / 瞎猫碰到死老鼠)

 

瞎貓碰到死老鼠 / 瞎猫碰到死老鼠

xiā māo pèng dào sǐ lǎo shǔ

"blind cat bump reach dead old mouse"

Blind cat bumps into dead mouse

This saying is about a blind cat bumping by chance into a dead mouse, and ending up taking the credit for killing it.

    It happened to me this week when I went to the Barnet Wellbeing Centre to teach English oral conversation to some incomers from Hong Kong (BNOs / British National (Overseas)), as a stand-in for their regular volunteer teacher.

    The lesson is conducted online via Zoom.  

    It's a more complicated set up than what I'd been used to so far.

    This is partly because I'm a tech dinosaur, and partly because I'd stopped using Zoom a few years ago when they started to limit each session to 40 minutes, with a four-minute wait before one can get back in.  

    It is, however, mainly because the Barnet Centre has a number of groups and sessions happening simultaneously with a Main Room for each teacher and Breakout Rooms (I still don't know what the difference is), so I need assistance from the staff at the centre in setting it up.  

    We ended up using two laptops:

* my own for sharing my screen because I need to input changes as the lesson progresses (I know how to work my laptop plus the Chinese character input from my own keyboard), 

as well as 

* the centre's laptop for talking to, and interacting with, the students.

    I'd needed assistance with the above every time for the previous three lessons.  

    The member of staff was not around yesterday when I was setting up my own laptop, so I fiddled around on my laptop, and hey presto, somehow I managed to get all of it working on my laptop:  share my screen AND talk to the students, all from the one laptop.

    I still don't know what I'd done to have achieved it.

    This would be a situation of a blind cat bumping into a dead mouse.

    (I'm not sure if I'd be able to repeat it next week...)

(London, 2025)