That’s Just Not PC
This was originally posted on deviantArt after my PC’s motherboard had a climactic knife fight with the processor where both sides lost. This is the journal post I made after I got my repaired PC back from Roger the Almighty PC Repair Guy.
I’m typing this on my own PC, which is a bag of mixed feelings. On the one hand, there’s the fact that part of me thoroughly enjoyed the experience of not being attached to my PC table for almost every hour of the day, on the other hand not having my own PC was like cutting off a creative limb of sorts1, and on the other hand its just nice to have an excuse to have my chair blocking the door to my room rather than the middle of the walkway between my bed and my wardrobe. Hang on, that’s three hands…
Anyway, I basically have a new computer now. It’s still a thick French design but now it has fresh American tech inside it. Like all new computers though (and toddlers) there are some teething problems, especially since this PC now has to pick up from where the old one left off, and that’s a very sizeable responsibility – one that essentially had a huge part in killing the old PC (knife fights between processors and motherboards aside).
Let’s put this in the perspective of an office job – we’ll call my new PC “Trevor” for the sake of this analogy (because it just “feels” like a Trevor). Trevor has been given a new job replacing the role of Walter, the 87-year old arthritic war veteran who died recently through a combination of work stress and those various infections that he probably should have looked into having healed. It’s a cosy office, but unfortunately Walter accumulated an awful lot of documents – they’re literally everywhere, some are nicely filed but they’re mostly sprawling over his desktop and a lot of paperwork has been crammed into folders all willy-nilly in the hopes that it will all just go away. Trevor doesn’t quite understand the filing system – sometimes he doesn’t understand Walter’s handwriting either.
His new Boss (that’s me) tries to help as much as he can – he sorts all the files into various folders and Trevor manages to get some grip over the “filing system”2, but there are other things Trevor has to contend with, mainly the other staff members and office etiquette.
The other staff members were here since the beginning. Sure, a lot of them are friendly, Ms. Paint-Shop Pro and Mr. MSWorks don’t particularly care who they work with, in fact not having to explain everything in small words very slowly like they did for Walter is a nice change. Others aren’t so friendly – Mr. Audacity, the man from the sound recording department doesn’t like Trevor, because Trevor doesn’t understand how to send through all the noise being channelled through the office intercom system (my speakers) to his workshop for editing. Walter knew how to do that – Walter could do it in his sleep. The upper class toffs in the CD-burning department don’t quite like Trevor as well, they just don’t seem to be entirely compatible (I’m sure it’s a class thing, they seem to begrudgingly work together when forced…at gun-point).
Trevor hasn’t quite learned office etiquette either: he doesn’t know that you shouldn’t display the file extensions3 because they’re so easy to delete by accident when renaming files. Trevor doesn’t know what Walter did to stop the system from crashing every time Windows Explorer tries to view a video thumbnail (and neither does the Boss, since Walter just one day seemed to figure it out for himself).
Trevor has brought some new positives to the job though. He’s fixed that annoying dongle noise that Walter used to just hide by turning it off, and Trevor’s brought a new fan with him that makes a lot less noise than Walter’s had.
And there will probably be a few hundred little niggles and positives, but I’m secretly looking forward to working with this new PC, because I’d rather be with one than without one. Wouldn’t you?
There’s probably some sort of horrible message about technology reliance here somewhere, but I’m just too overjoyed about this to particularly care.
- The magical Technicolour limb that plays music and videos and allows you to manipulate images and text while doing a whole lot of complicated maths using its little finger on an abacus so that you don’t have to. ↩
- You have to use inverted commas because it appears the filing system that Walter and the Boss came up with was mostly based on chaos theory and existential philosophy. ↩
- Since, unlike a Linux system i.e. something modelled on interfaces of the prehistoric MS-DOS era, we now have graphics to tell us what the file type is. ↩
Post by Sean Patrick Payne+ | February 6, 2009 at 2:49 am | Real Life, Technology | No comment
Tags: odds and sods, PC repair