Who loves ya baby?

Saturday, 06 October 2007

Recently I read an article by Lamont Wood that opened up with the following paragraph...

"It’s the relationship you spend more time on than any other. It has deepened even during the past few years. When things go wrong, you become enraged and tearful and attack inanimate objects — but you’re willing to spend hours making things right."

What relationship are they talking about? Your girlfriend, your spouse, your cat that likes to lacerate you as it's national feline past time? No. Well, how about this fact to clue you in. Supportsoft, Inc. commissioned an interesting survey of Americans, and they were all asked the following question. Which do you spend more time with your computer OR your spouse? The results found that a whole WHOPPING 64% of Americans spent MORE time with their COMPUTER than their SPOUSE!

The other questions asked also produced interesting numbers when asked what they wanted to do when the computer had a problem...

32 percent said that they basically shrugged
19 percent admitted to wanting to hurl their compy out the nearest window
11 percent used language normally reserved for "special occasions"
(7 percent did so loudly, 3 percent did so tearfully)
9 percent felt stranded and alone
3 percent additionally vented their wrath on inanimate objects.

I thought about it for a little while. Thought about what I did when my computer breaks. My process looks like this...

1. Curse out loud to the almighty roman god of infernal machines.
2. Think to myself "BAH! This mortal man can yet fix this piece of future junkyard circuitry."
3. Scour the www.whatever-fix-I-can-get-my-hands-on.com pages.
4. Curse the gods again for not finding something, dodge the lightning bolts and apologize.
5. Call PC Support, grumble and moan at the person on the other end until the become annoyed and fix it as fast as they can so they don't have to hear me anymore.

What do you do when your computer does something worthy of Olympic Computer Tossing?

posted by: psmartin at 02:33 | link | comments (5) |
technical, blogosphere
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Comments:

#1 06 October 2007 - 02:45

Great post!!! Kudos!!! What do I do whenmy computer does something worthy of Olympic Computer Tossing?.....ummmm.....I am the fist one to toss the freaking thing!!

mgrhetos2

#2 06 October 2007 - 02:56

A couple years ago, right before finals, my computer started emitting a clunka-clunka sound, and then died. When I turned it back on, I got an error message: "cannot find hard drive"

I curled up into a fetal position and wept like a little girl.

Pooklekufr

#3 06 October 2007 - 02:58

It turned out that the read-write head had crashed through the plate, destroying all my data.

The repairman told me this in the exact same tone a doctor would tell relatives the surgery had not gone well. I guess he saw the look on my face.

Pooklekufr

#4 06 October 2007 - 07:21

And now you back things up religiously, right, Pookie? (Religiously in a nondenominational, agnostic sort of way, of course.)

I have had a lot of computers and hard drives go south on me over the years, and when it's bad, I begin to sweat, pace frantically and begin the process of trying to fix it. I experience hours of anxiety, dark thoughts, pretending that it didn't happen, cursing my dependency on the device in question and engaging in pointless mind over matter exercises.

Then, if the news is really grim, I comfort myself by thinking that in about 1 month from that moment, somehow, someway, I know that my life will have returned to some kind of normalcy.

howard

#5 10 October 2007 - 16:58

Hey Pookie, my apple computer died during finals. I used all the cusswords I knew in all four languages that I speak, then cried, exhausted myself, then cried again. I paid a good amount of money to have a technician come to my house and get the info out of my hard drive. The problem was a defective power cord. CompUSA kept my G5 desktop for three months (the arses) before they fixed it. I have never gone back to them. I now take my computers (all three of them) to apple to be fixed. One of my two laptops had a defective battery which suddenly swelled up. Apple quickly replaced it, and although I have a back up laptop, I was NOT happy cos my baby wasn't working. I don't write notes, I type them. Hence my attachment to my computers.