How Do You Like Them Apples? Part One

My computer is not demure. It rumbles and farts and belches and sometimes it revs up like an airplane. You get used to it. Recently, though, it began to snicker. "I know something you don't know," it rattled, which seemed likely enough. I didn't press the issue.

The computer was not original to me, but was only a few months old and lightly used when it passed to me after a death in the family. At first I thought it might be haunted, but eventually I realized it was probably just the Windows Vista. Periodically it would get the vapors. It would be mincing right along and then suddenly it would collapse on the divan and fan itself. "My, my," it would sigh, urping just a little, then "Lordy, lordy," one leg dangling languid off the side, a pale hand fluttering at its bosom. You could tell it to fetch you a tray of juleps all you wanted to, but there was no hurrying it off the couch. And then several times a day it would freeze solid just for the pure hell of it. I responded to this by clicking on everything in sight until the cursor itself seized up, and then there was nothing to do but sit back and give it the stink-eye until it came to again, presenting me with a visibly thick stack of windows representing everything I'd clicked on. I'd have to hack through these until I uncovered my original thought.

For many years I was drawn to and repelled by my computers. "Do this, and go find that," I'd tell them, and they'd roll their eyes at me and say, "God, you're stupid." Which I found irritating and irrefutable. My neighbor Beth was one of the first to help me get over this. I had her over to figure out something I was doing wrong, and she sat down, relaxed, wielding my mouse with self-assurance. It promptly served up the same error message I had gotten, which she dispatched with a dismissive "poo" and tried the same thing over again. Again with the error message, once more with the "poo," and repeat, four, maybe five times, until finally the machine rolled over and did as it was told. Ah! So it's like riding a horse, and you just have to let it know who's in charge? I can try that. Of course, I can't ride a horse.

Al Einstein said that was the definition of insanity--doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. But he didn't have a PC.

After Beth showed me how to flick an error message away, I was more relaxed, but I still found the thing annoying. I'd send it off to find a simple file, and it would rattle and gurgle and cogitate away, but it never found anything. Instead of being irritated that the machine was smarter than me, I realized it was worse than that. It was just as dumb as me.

So the other day when it began snickering and acting up, I ignored it. The screen had come up dark as twilight and swallowed my cursor. I dealt with this in the usual way, which could be replicated with one forearm on the keyboard, and then I shut it down. You've got all night to think about what you've done, I said. The next day a screen came up with a scolding tone to it, and I ignored that too. Later the twilight fell again. I shut it down. I yanked it back to life. "Poo," I told it.

Soon comes a night when I'm very busy at a mindless but addictive game that ruins my posture, strains my neck and is so bad for my eyes that little mah-jongg images have been seared into my retinas. I'm leaning into the screen and POOM! The whole thing blows up and goes black, sudden as the Voice of God, who sounded a lot like my optometrist. My game was gone. So were my photos and address book and a number of other things I haven't thought of yet. It was very, very dead, and there was nothing left to do but look up "doornail" in the dictionary.

To be continued.

Packet Droppings

My computer started to sludge up a few days ago. I did the same thing I do with my other relationships: I pretended it was all in my imagination and everything would be fine the next day. It was sludgier the next day. I had a poke at downloading updates and subjecting my anti-virus program to disciplinary action, but the sludge remained. It took me a day and a half to get my rat photo sucked up into the blog, and it wasn't that great a photo. I don't like my own blog judging me. I shut the whole machine down and sent it to its room. Wait till your father gets home, I said. I was peeved.

One of the worst months of my life was spent dealing with an internet service provider when I couldn't get any mail to go to or fro, which is really about all I was asking it to do. Every day off for a month I was on the phone to my new friends in India (Victoria and Alexander, I believe they said), who spent hours emptying my computer until it was cleaner than a colonoscopy patient. Then they filled it back up with jellybeans and joy and pronounced it healed, and hung up, and I tried to send an email, and I got the same error window (accompanied by an orchestral chord of doom that, to this day, will send me to my knees), and then I burst into tears. How I could be made so miserable with technology I had managed to live without for forty years? That's when friend told me about a local ISP, Spiretech.com. They are so local I can see them without a passport--I mean, they're right over there--and when I call them up, I get two ringy-dingies and then, bam, a human being comes on the line. And it's usually a human being with a mass of monitors and such in front of him and a calm voice and the ability to see what's inside my computer and possibly my very soul. Then we all get in the balloon and fly back to Kansas. No, they really exist.

So when my computer pouted and refrained from even sending email this morning, I called up my friends at SpireTech. Got Jaysen on the second ring. He never laughs at me except in the right places. He got to work right away and determined that I had 25,408 errors. That's a lot even for me. Furthermore--he informed me with a gratifying tone of awe--I was dropping packets like crazy. Why, I was at a layer two packet loss. It was like I was picking up a packet and then dropping it right away, picking up another packet and dropping it, he explained. I thought I felt something. I used to have an old guy on my mail route who dropped packets in every way you can think of. His brain had thinned out alarmingly, for one thing; but also, when I gave him his mail, before I learned to put a rubber band on it, he would drop one letter, drop another in the act of picking it up, bend over and pick that one up, drop another, and so on and so forth, until he'd done a complete circle and was back at the mailboxes. Then he'd look for more mail. If he could have done this starting at his apartment door, he'd have had an easier time finding his way home, which had gotten to be an issue.

"So this is bad, these 25,000 errors and the severe packet droppings?" I asked Jaysen. He said it wasn't good. This actually made me feel better, that someone in a remote location was able to document that I was truly sludgy and not just whiny. He got my DSL provider, Qwest, on the line, and we had ourselves a jolly little three-way for a while, during which Jason advocated for me and even tried to spank the Qwest fellow right through the phone on my behalf, but the Qwest fellow was a friend of Victoria's and Alexander's and just as unflappable. I tried crawling under the table and messing with the wires with the cat on my back, and then I tried with the cat on my modem. I believe we left off with the solution that someone from the phone company was going to come out and knock squirrels off my lines, and then we'd see. The main point, as I see it, is it isn't my fault.