Kerasshhh

My computer died yesterday, and it must have been a painful demise. I didn't get the dreaded blue screen, or the even scarier black screen with an indecipherable message. When I tried to boot up, I got a painful whining sound, like a small animal caught in a trap. I tried several times to make it stop crying but it wouldn't. I felt as if I'd shot a songbird with a bb gun--guilty, horrified, waiting or God's wrath.

"Sounds like the hard drive's gone bad," said my favorite techie. "Nope, can't even begin to look at it until Monday morning, but you can bring it in now..."

So I did, paying the state of Virginia $3.50 to drive the eight miles from my home to the repair site.

I have a long history with computers. I bought my first one in the very early 80s, a Kaypro portable that I will donate someday to the Smithsonian. It was portable only in the mind of its creators. It weighed about as much as a Singer sewing machine, took up more space, and so impressed the flight attendants that it got its own seat in business class during international flights while I stayed in the plebe section. I took it to Africa, Europe and Asia, lugged it to hotels without electricity, let it spend three days in a chief’s house in Senegal.
It had no memory to speak of, and I remember hooking it up to a daisy wheel printer and being amazed as page after page of text flowed out.

I now own four computers—not including my phone--and not one of them really works correctly. As applications have gotten more complex, they've also become needlessly confusing. The computer I am now using is a tiny Samsung something-or-other. I wanted a simple word processor capable of getting email and searching the Internet. No such animal is readily available so what I have has a digital live camera that I will never use, a keyboard as responsive as a hunk of plywood, built-in stereo speakers (why?), and a beautiful screen-saver featuring a koi pond, lillypads and dragonflies. The command keys on the Samsung don’t do the same thing as on my other computer, so that pressing F1 or F2 is a real surprise. It took me ten minutes to figure out how to turn the capitals off in order to not write ALL CAPS, WHICH IS REALLY ANNOYING, DON’T YOU THINK?

What bothers me the most, I think, is my incredible dependence on all these things that do not work quite properly. My only real consolation is that I am probably in the mainstream. A recent article in the Washington Post says that most of us, since we cannot—or don’t want to—afford the very best of the very best, make do with the second- or third-best--items that look like top-of-the-line, but aren’t, and whose functions are limited or prone to failure. When we finally get fed up with such items, we discard them and buy the next incarnations of not-quite-what-we-want-to-buy-but-close-enough.
What I should do is become a neo-Luddite. I won’t smash machinery as the original Brtish textile workers did, but I will rid myself over the next few years of anything having more than four visible moving parts.

Actually, I won't. I'm much too enamored of the digital camera that takes better photos than I ever could, the little gadget allowing me to record myself when I play music, the Bose radio, the guitar synth. All toys, all toys that break. But I really wouldn’t mind trading a few of these amusements for things that really work well and stay working well. It’s the upkeep that will be my downfall.