I had Juno set up for email. Juno�s a program that lets you have email without using the Internet. Juno goes online for about a minute gets your mail from a server, and downloads it to the home file on your computer. It's a pain to check from computers other than your main one, but it�s free and all you need is a modem. Juno worked great when I first installed it after college, but as the years went by, Juno's routine features became more time-consuming. Static ads got replaced by flash animation ads, and my wee computer had to make up the slack. Like an aging track star, it took longer and longer to run the same course.
Here was my average schedule for checking email, circa October 2001.
6:00 - step in the door, turn on the computer, followed closely by either the TV or radio.
6:01 - the background screen comes on, but gets blocked by a Network Option password. I click CANCEL to it. A couple years ago, this started showing up on the screen before I got to do anything. Theoretically, I can type my password to access the (nonexistent) network my computer's linked to. I looked for a while on chucking this, but couldn't find how. I never entered a password for this function, so who knows what'd I do if I really wanted to go on this fictional network.
6:03 - click off the Diskscan window, which has slowly replaced the Network Option window in popping up. My computer really needs a compressing, but to do so requires the Windows 95 disk that I installed on the computer, and that disk is with my former roommate's brother, and I think even he was borrowing it from someone. (This computer's so old, it was pre-loaded with Windows 3.1.)
6:04 - computer finally completes startup. I click on the Juno icon.
6:05 - Juno log on screen comes on. I type in my password.
6:06 - the first Juno ad. Usually some e-commerce site.
6:07 - the second Juno ad. Usually a house ad for Juno's premium service.
6:09 - I finally get to my mailbox, with somewhere shy of 1000 saved messages. Juno's storage won't let me save more than 1000, even though the burden's on my computer to deal with it. When it hits the 990s, I prune. I've pruned several times. I don't save many emails, but two or three saved per day can build up pretty fast. A window pops up asking me if I want to log on. I click yes.
6:10-6:14 - logging on. A minute to process the request, then a minute to dial in (assuming it doesn't have to go to an alternate number, which happens 5% of the time) and two minutes to process the mail it gets. On an average day, ten messages. Today, let's say eleven. This slowness is due to the 56K modem and the swamped Juno connection, so the 100-megahertz monster is not to blame for this particular timechewer.
6:15 - I get back to my main mail screen, and the torturous process of reading the emails begin. It's usually a 50/50 balance between real email and spam. Let's say a real message comes up first, some Mixed Signal email coordinating a practice at 12:30 on Sunday. There're probably more messages on this topic below, so I don't bother replying until I've read everything sent on the matter. Onto message two. 6:16 - A full minute after, the second message finally appears on the screen. Message two is spam, but just text spam. This only takes the time of a regular message to pop up. Gone in 60 seconds. I take this 60 seconds to run to the kitchen and start boiling water for dinner. I usually lose two or three minutes that way, and I'm not counting that time.
6:18 - Message three is bad spam. Full of pictures and graphics and links to websites. Since Juno isn't constantly connected to the Internet, these all show up as the red "beats the hell out of me" puzzle pieces, or that triangle-square-circle logo that's seat filler for real images. It also prompts a message saying that it'll check Juno to connect via the web. I have never once connected to the web via Juno. Trying takes ten or fifteen minutes, and it never succeeds, since I'm dialing the swamped free numbers instead of the premium access numbers I constantly delete ads for. I click off this message as soon as I see it. It only comes up for the first bad spam.
6:19 - Mixed Signals confirmation of the 12:30 practice.
6:20 - jfuiehenguj573892 says I've qualified for a loan. Must have been a grueling process.
6:21 - grwuhnv7y3463n has the hotest grils on the Internet for me. I wonder what sort of grils these are, and if maybe there's any grils that are hoter than them.
6:22 - duplicate message from jfuiehenguj573892. If this guy wants to give me money so much, someone tell him to send a check. At this point I run to the kitchen to drop some pasta in the water, so add another uncounted minute to this.
6:23 - the rare real email, a real letter. From one of various people I know who write whole sentences, sometimes even paragraphs. These are the messages I save.
6:24 - spam from Amazon.com. I read this one, seeing if there's any gift certificates or free shipping involved. There's not, so it must die.
6:25 - jfuiehenguj573892, again. It's useless to respond to most of these, even to put myself on the remove list, since the ISP usually shuts down the response email along with everything else this guy has online an hour after this is sent. So even if I wanted to get a loan from Mr. jfuiehenguj573892, I wouldn't be able to contact him. Mailing addresses are very rare, since that gives an actual location where spam is coming from. What it boils down to is spam bothering a million people in the slight chance that the spammer can make twenty bucks by the end of the day.
6:26 - The obligatory Juno spam, usually just one of the banner ads appearing in the email space. And that's the last email. Time to respond. For the sake of brevity, let's say I just have one message, a Mixed Signal confirmation that I can make the 12:30. So to cut out all the composing time that I'd have in writing a real letter, I just type "I can make it." This sentence can literally take two minutes. Juno's rotating banner ads takes up an overwhelming amount of my teeny computing power, enough so that when Flash animation is running, or when the ads switch every minute, I can't even type. A minor setback for an email system.
6:28 - I click on the time in the lower bottom left hand corner, which is currently showing somewhere in the vicinity of 2:30 in the morning. Since two weeks into owning this computer, the automatic clock's been busted. It runs fine, so long as the computer's on. When I turn it off at night, the clock stops, and starts the next day from the exact point it got turned off at. So unless I log in and change the time every day, all email is noted as being sent from ridiculous times a day or two before. (I forget about this some days; check any old messages I sent you at 4:34 A.M. to call me on it.)
6:29 - I go to the Get Mail button as soon as humanly possible, reconnecting me online. This time it only takes two minutes, since there's just one message going over the phone lines (and sometimes one or two recent spams shooting back at me). I drain the pasta now.
6:31 - I click off of Juno. A window pops up asking me if I'm sure I want to delete the spams I flushed. I click Yes, and the hideous signing off begins. Juno must process all 990 messages, even though 987 weren't touched. This takes four minutes. In this time I eat the pasta, and then bake a souffle. Then I bake a second souffle to bring to work the next day.
6:35 - I'm done. Right now I realize I wanted to send a two word email out to someone, and didn't. I decide to wait until tomorrow, since I don't want another half hour of my life taken away so soon.
I was a frog in a boiling pot, not getting out of the water since it was only heating gradually. It was cold water when I came in here, and there's no one day so radically worse than yesterday that it drives me to buy a new computer.
Then something happened. I was clearing out old files one Saturday to hopefully slow down the RAM logjam. I found Caddyshack sounds I downloaded in 1996, and, after playing them all, threw them out. I got a little overzealous, selected a whole bunch of 'useless' files doing nothing, and gave them the heave-ho. I then tried to check Juno, and got a message that utility opening software wasn�t being found. I tried another function. Ditto. I chucked the sparkplug that started every program. Smooth.
I had been checking prices on computers for months now. I knew I'd be buying a new computer sometimes soon. The question to me was if I'd do if of my own accord, or if some volcanic meltdown would force my hand. As I expected, my hand was forced. In addition to the email problems, both the CD-Rom and the disk drive were broken. And AOL took abysmally long. And I couldn't play 75% of computer games because my computer was fickle about what programs it decided to run. My hand was forced, but it didn't have to be forced very hard.
I bought the new computer that very same day, a cheetah-like follow through considering my usual reluctance to any purchase over a dollar. I didn't want to be without a computer for very long. I found a great deal at Best Buy: 900 MHz computer, monitor and printer for $429. That�s the price after the $370 in rebates, so I was paying roughly double, and hoping that six separate checks would find their way through the mail. (As of this writing, three have made it, but they were the three biggest ones.) It's another low end computer, but the next step up would be about $1000, and wouldn't do anything that the $429 computer couldn't do.
Before disassembling my lobotomized 1996 computer, I turned it on, just for the hell of it. It worked just like normal. I could access any program I wanted. My goof got reset when the computer rebooted. I would have been upset if my computer wasn�t the utter dungheap it was. As it was, it was mildly amusing, and it let me email some files off the computer before I heaved it off my desk.
Here's my login process for the new computer.
6:00 - turn it on. The background screen, a close up shot of the moon, comes up within thirty seconds.
6:00:30 - click on Juno.
6:00:35 - I get one preliminary ad. The house ad for premium service is dropped with this computer, for some reason.
6:00:40 - I click on Get and Receive Messages. This still takes a while, because it's still a 56K modem and I'm still calling on the free numbers only. 'While' is relative, so it only takes a tad over a minute.
6:02 - the normal ten messages come in. Today, let's say eleven.
6:04 - eight spams in a row from uhguihr657 and honryguy6455 and get deleted rapid fire. I check Mixed Signal confirmations in between them, and the one real letter.
6:05 - I'm done. I click off Juno, and within five seconds, the window's packed up and gone.
I had my old computer for five years. It's sitting in a heap next to my couch now. If I had a basement, it'd be in there. If I had a catapult, same deal. Maybe I'll stick it under the bed with the Brother word processor. Or send a spam to a million people announcing it for sale. The new computer's probably capable of letting me do spam. If I get twenty bucks, it'll be worth it.