I decided it was entirely too preachy and whiney, whiny, whinee,... filled with whine. So instead I am doing what I always seem to do these days and that is to write off the cuff.
(And those cuffs are getting QUITE frayed and could use a referbishing, let me tell you!)
I cannot disagree.
I'll just stick to the salient, saliant points.
(What's WRONG with you?)
No spell checker, so I'm putting down all the variant, varient spellings when I'm in doubt.
(Oh My God. This is going to be a bad day....)
As I was SAYING... before the computer disaster even occured, I had been dealing with a disturbing thing in my little corner of tubeland. My web browser of choice for the last few years has been Flock. Flock was everything I wanted in a browser. I won't bore you with the minutia, but suffice it to say, I loved it like peanut butter. It did everything I wanted it to and more.
And then one day I got an email from the administrators telling me that they were no longer going to support Flock with updates or security and that its functions would eventually degrade and stop working altogether.
What the ???????????
I don't want to make false accusations or anything but I just wonder who greased who's palm on this one???
(That sounds like a false accusation to me right there....)
Oh?
You have an over active imagination.
Anyway, I had spent several days after the demise of Flock reconfiguring Internet Explorer to collect all my RSS feeds which I had to reconstruct from scratch and to try to reconcile to the irritation of using it at all. I really loathe IE. Sorry.
So I was already in a bad mood is what I'm saying. And when I looked back at all the stuff I (we) have gone through with these whirring boxes, well, I got a little testy.
Though there are really great things about them, and I will get to that later. Right now I feel like most of the time computers behave like a really crappy boyfriend.
A boyfriend that takes all your money, forgets your birthday, changes personalities, when he sees you first thing in the morning pretends he doesn't know you every single day, changes the locks on the front door, breaks your favorite china, makes up new relationship rules willy nilly, burns down your house, loses your birth certificate...oh wait, that's another discussion... sucks up all your time like a black hole, throws learning curves at you that are so steep they make you fall over backwards into the stack of manuals that you never read, drops your precious photo albums into the dumpster in back of Safeway, turns termites loose into your home filing cabinet and finally checks himself into rehab without notice and takes all your mp3s with him where they are used for arts and crafts projects in group therapy sessions.
And what do we do???
!!!!
We PAY for his rehab.
EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. !!!
The one thing I have learned about computers is that nothing lasts. There is no permanence, permanance and that no data is truly safe, they are going to change dramatically at any moment, and the things you love and get attached to are going to be taken away from you. And I have a drawer full of hard drives from dead computers to prove it.
This is not good for human beings.
Human beings like to feel safe and secure.
But computers don't know anything about our feelings.
I have been jilted by Flock, betrayed by Acer, left at the alter by Pandora's Box which won't work in Windows 7, and abandoned by my first IP provider who started his business in his basement in Mount Shasta.
Abandonment issues?
I have 'em!!!
I'm sitting at the gates, [no not Gates] like Job, [no, not Jobs] the biblical Job, scraping my boils with a bit of plastic from my latest broken motherboard resisting the advice from the gloom and doom gallery to curse God and die.
(This is getting a little too melodramatic don't you think?)
Sniff.
That's easy for you to say. It's not YOUR Discover card that as of today has the enormous unpaid balance....
And the thing that really worries me now, is even with all my abandoment isues and strings of bitter failures, disappointmens and betrayals, I have a date to embark on a 'round the world cruise with some guy I found on the internet. His name is Mac and I have never actually met him in person.
He's supposed to arrive by UPS on Tuesday.
I hope he'll be gentle with me.
***
(Ah, I don't mean to be crass, I can see you are distressed. But you said that there were some really great things about computers and that you were going to get to that. I just thought you should finish out your thoughts for continuity's sake.)
Okay.
Sniff.
Dancing Star said it just the other day...and right now it's the only light I see at the end of this tunnel...
"I love my computer. So many of my friends live there."