A few weeks before Christmas I had a bad week with computers. I was a walking EMP pulse. Everything electronic that I use daily was in orbital decay. I was not a happy camper.
I decided the best solution was to drink beer and whine. Halfway through my beer fueled grievance process, a technically adept friend showed up. The poor guy had to listen to several minutes of my rants before I got the point.
Curmudgeon: “Every OS in the vicinity is toast. My laptop only works half the time, my Kindle’s ‘app memory’ is overloaded, and my truck’s software keeps throwing false errors.”
Friend: “Your truck is suffering software glitches?”
Curmudgeon: “It’s a Dodge.”
Friend: Full of sympathy. “I’m so sorry.”
Curmudgeon: “Let’s get drunk.”
Friend: “At least you can sort out the Kindle. Why not do a reset to factory settings?”
Curmudgeon: “I’ve done ‘resets’ and ‘recovers’ like that and usually thing go from suck to blow.”
Friend: “Well this is an Android so…”
Curmudgeon: “I’m like ‘I just jammed in the damn distribution media’ and the computer’s all like ‘data error on disk 5 of 9… I’m turning into a brick now’. This one time I had an HP computer…”
Friend: “This is a cloud based system…”
Curmudgeon: “Don’t get me started about the friggin cloud! Those son’s a bitches have been trying to turn my home PC into a ‘dumb terminal’ since forever. They call it cloud and everyone thinks ‘Google apps’ is like this brilliant new idea. I need to ‘phone home’ to word process a page of text and that’s an improvement? Good grief they have damn near shoved ‘dumb terminal’ up our asses and it’s all because they call it cloud. Those swine! And another thing; give everyone a NSA tracking device and the people rejoice because it plays ‘Angry birds’…”
Friend: “Um… how many beers have you had?”
Curmudgeon: Popping another beer, “I dunno’ some integer that’s not prime. Who’s counting? I bought this stuff called ‘Burning Skye’, it was on sale.”
Friend: Rooting through the box to come up with the last bottle. “Scottish Ale? May I?”
Curmudgeon: Taking a huge swig of beer, “Of course, check out the graphic design on the box, looks like someone read too much Tolkien.”
Friend: Sipping the beer, “Ugh… this isn’t very good.”
Curmudgeon: “Tastes like piss! Don’t say I didn’t warn ya!”
Friend: “But you didn’t…”
Curmudgeon: “Watch out dude, this beer is called ‘Burning Skye’ but it tastes like ‘Burning Ass’.”
Friend: “Your timing leaves a little to be…”
Curmudgeon: “Goddamn dumb terminals! I ought to blast the thing with a 20 gauge! Resets never work.”
Friend: Sighing “I think you’re not getting the cloud thing. There’s nothing on the Kindle that’s not on the cloud right?”
Curmudgeon: “Damn straight! I downloaded everything but Amazon still has the list of books I’ve bought. I’m screwed! When the zombie apocalypse happens I won’t have any books to read. I’ll have to wipe my ass with electronics. I should have never given up on paper…”
Friend: “Trust me on this.”
Curmudgeon: “Cthultu is pissed.”
Friend: “Who?”
Curmudgeon: “Oh… you’ll know when the time comes…”
Eventually the dismal Burning Skye did it’s work. I was ready to forget my misgivings with “hard resets”. I set out to do the deed.
Stay tuned…
