Patience is a game

This morning, at 2am while I sat in bed playing a game on my iPad I got to thinking how things had changed, but also stayed the same in the 22 years of my working life.

The reason for this was the game I was playing. No Angry Birds or FarmVille, not even Sudoko. I was totally engrossed in a game of Patience (or Solitaire as it seems to be now called). And that's where things have stayed the same.

Back in the early 1990s we had computers (in some of the places I worked), we had Windows 3.0, and the only game available was Solitaire - a plain old card game invented for Microsoft by Susan Kare.

So additive was this simple game (or maybe it was that work was so boring) that many companies actually got their IT staff to remove or hide the game (if they hid it I often found it!) - one man at least is known to have been sacked for playing it whilst supposedly working).

If, like me, you played a lot you'll remember that if you changed the deck to the beach scene every now and again the sun would stick its tongue out at you from the back of the pack! Or did I make that up?!?

The soundtrack to many conversations with my aunt was the click, click, click of the mouse as she played.

If I couldn't get to a computer (we didn't have a windows pc at home) I'd sometimes even play with real cards laid out on the floor!

So, now I still play regularly. But 22 years later, things are a little different.

I certainly don't need the cards anymore, and even without them I can play anywhere - even in bed at two o'clock in the morning with the lights off!

This was my last game last night on my iPod - I won (the autocomplete turns on when all the cards are out and completion is possible).