Tech and Science

Head Lock

My PC locked up again. Third time today. I am tired of calling the “service” number.

One service guy told me, “Oh don’t worry about it. I reboot mine a few times a day. It wont hurt it.”

Hey, modem-breath, I’m not worried about it hurting the computer. It’s hurting me. It takes 5 minutes for it to RESTART. During this process I have to enter 14 passwords. This really isn’t so bad because every one of my passwords is the word ‘password’.

Why does the damn thing just stop? It’s almost as if it was thinking too hard and gave up. It needs to reboot just to clean out the mental pipes and try again. I think my computer puts too much pressure on itself. What it needs is a little Prozac. Or at least some St. John’s Wort.

A big problem is that when it reboots it resets the volume. Then when the Windows label comes on the screen it plays a loud orchestra sound like the “Audience is Listening” music at the movie theater. And it’s LOUD. When I have to reboot at three in the morning my computer can wake up Marilyn Monroe in the Westwood cemetery.

I miss my Mac.

Why, oh why, did I ever sell my Macintosh? I used to have Mac Classic. It wasn’t like an iMac or a PowerMac. You could call it MiniMac. But it did a lot of things my big PC doesn’t do:

– The programs worked well with each other.

Any program on my PC that uses the modem seems to handle the phone line differently. It you upload a web-site using Frontpage, then Outlook Express wont connect. If you use Outlook Express for e-mail, then somehow you can’t use the contact manager properly. Eventually you have to, say it together now, “REBOOT!”

– It was cute.

If a Mac Classic was a dog, it would be a Golden Retriever puppy you could use to meet women at the dog park.

“Awww, isn’t he cute, what’s his name?” ”

“Well, his name is Mac Classic. I got him at the pound. His family died in a fire. My name is Joe, let’s get some coffee.”

– It always worked.

I can’t remember one time it didn’t work. It always turned on, always ran. It was like a happy child. Like those fresh scrubbed kids in the Alaska Airlines commercials that grow up to be flight attendants. Maybe Alaska Airlines is running their entire company on a Mac Classic right now.

– It was portable?

Well, not exactly. You could pick it up easily and move it around your room. But it wasn’t portable like a laptop. I did buy a travel case for it. It was like carrying a two-drawer file in a laundry bag.

– It was easy to take a floppy to Kinko’s.

Well, now it’s easy to take a PC file to Kinko’s as well. At the time I had the Mac Classic, they didn’t have any PC’s to pop a floppy into for laser printing. Kinko’s employees were skateboarders and punk rockers. They used Macs. They thought PC users were Reagan lovers driven by greed and red meat.

But, eventually, it was too small, too slow. I needed a new computer. Why not a new Mac? Because at my job they use PC’s and I wanted to take work home- so I paid several thousand dollars for a whiz-bang PC. It has all kinds of stuff:

– Ethernet Port for printer sharing.

– Digital Flat Panel Port “For Next Generation PC Monitors”.

– Digital Creativity Imaging Center.

In other words, stuff I’ll never use.

Bring back the Mac Classic. It worked.

And it was cute.

Joe Ditzel

Joe Ditzel is a keynote speaker, humor writer, and really bad golfer. You can reach him via email at [email protected] as well as Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn.

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