Monday, November 23, 2009
Old No. 36 is falling deeper into computer doom
Ben Beagle
The aging, semi-hysterical retired reporter rides shotgun with the greatest station wagon driver of them all down the rocky road of life. Mondays in the paper's Extra section, steady as she goes.
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It's certainly no secret that Old No. 36 here is not very good in the area of cyberspace.
Which is to say that if I fell over a motherboard while I was bringing the mobile trash can back from the road, I would probably scream for help.
I hate my mobile trash can no matter where it is, but that is not the issue here.
The issue is Yours Truly here falling ever deeper into computer doom.
I don't speak computer
Recently this very young computer I bought went crazy, and I took it to one of the computer gurus.
You know. You have to bow a little at the entrance and then somebody has to hit a gong pretty hard before they let you in and they charge you roughly half of what the new machine cost.
And there may be a slight smell of incense.
I don't think any of these costs are covered by the warranty -- unless you bust the thing up with a sledge hammer.
And the experts say things like "motherboard" and "spyware" a lot. And what scares you is that they know what they're talking about.
And they purge your brand-new computer of all of this evil and they take out your medical records and several pretty good poems you've written.
Not only that. They put a funny edition of AOL on your machine.
Hello, lady, and goodbye
In this version, this sultry female voice with a British accent welcomes you, and before you know it, everything is valued in pounds instead of the U.S. dollar.
Which is quite enough to startle your average chap these bloody days.
I have to say that the sultry-voiced intro here is a little better than the eager, male welcoming voice you were used to before the new computer went nuts.
I pushed a few buttons like the typist on the live-chat help line told me to, and I got back the old AOL and the male voice, which sometimes gets on my nerves.
But he does let you know when the Hanes underwear people have this great bargain on plaid shorts on e-mail and those T-shirts with the necks that don't shrivel up.
An aside to the Hanes people: I am somewhat up in years and probably have enough underwear to last me until I go take a trip on that Great Gospel Ship -- as we sometimes said in Radford.
I'm only human, of course, and I'd be less than truthful if I didn't say I miss the way the British girl said goodbye.
Ben Beagle's column runs in Monday's Extra.
