Almost every time something goes wrong, technologically speaking, it’s with my computer. DVD player? Sweet as a nut. Video? Well, it’s never eaten a tape yet, in the past twenty or so years. CD player? Sometimes it doesn’t play things, but you know, that’s not a big deal. But when things don’t work, it’s always, always the computer.

I’ve had more computer problems than I know what to do with. Lost more data due to poorworkmanship, buggy amateurish code, and appallingly ignorant error messages than a civil servant on a mission to shred embarrassing documents.

So let me tell you the latest problem. Last night, apropros of nothing, Windows told me it couldn’t find the modem – sure, just a usual mistake on the behalf of an awful Operating System then. Look round the back, yep, the modems on, the lights blinking the cables are all plugged in, everything looks fine, but for some reason, it couldn’t find the modem.

It’s kinda like my brain telling me that it’s ‘lost’ my arm, when its obviously attached to my shoulder.

And there’s more. A quick reboot later, and…..nothing. No, not that it can’t find the modem. That’s relatively small fry. Hell, now it can’t even load the operating system. A plain black screen, some dreadful text that’s both too small and too quick to be read.

What it tells me is, I think, that :

I’m then given 5 seconds, Mission Impossible style to relaunch my computer in a variety of modes. None of which, by the way, work. So I’ve got this wonderful, fabulous computer that’s too darn stupid to switch itself on. It’s like sitting behind the wheel of a car and finding out that not is it not going to start, you’re not even going to be able to find out why

I can guess, but I can’t guarantee why it doesn’t load. It sounds like, somewhere deep inside the guts of this thing, some vital bit of code got corrupted. Far be it from me to tell Microsoft how to do things – but maybe, if it was that important, they’d do something clever. Like, I dunno, auto-install the code on two separate parts of the disc drive so that in a minor bit of corruption wouldn’t cause it to grind to a halt like some kind of paralysed slug. But hey, that’s only my idea, and it doesn’t count for squat.

Now all I have to remember is that in order for my computer to do what its meant to do I have to treat it like a child – need to attend to it’s needs twenty four hours a day, or more. I need to scan disk, defrag, disc cache index, tidy up, disk clean up, backup, auto update, virus scan check, spam filter and port close it and just hope that it still works. To hope that it doesn’t perform something as vague as ’an illegal operation’ and take all my work and stuff intos some kind of electronic afterworld limbo of zeroes and ones, like Dante’s special Eight Circle Of Hell, reserved solely for Microsoft programmers and virus writers.

Of course, this isn’t the first time something like that has happened. In December my computer power socket fused up. Before that, in May, it went completely tits-up (to use a technical phrase there), whilst installing something and I had to spend all night rebuilding the OS and reinstalling. Prior to that, the previous December, my other computer melted. The floppy disc drive melted in the machine and the machine refused to boot. Then the computer would auto start in the two-colour safe mode, and because the floppy drive had melted I couldn’t even save my work onto floppies. If it started at all.

And all that started in March, when the hard drive decided it couldn’t function for more than ten minutes without auto-restarting as the system became unstable, due , in no small part to a buggy bit of Windows code, and a Scandisk that could never complete due to the Ten-Minute-Self-Destruct rule. Every ten minutes or so, no matter where I was, or what I was doing, the PC would freeze, black screen, and reboot, together with an unnecessary, unavoidable, and non-functioning disc check process. It just told me I had bad sectors (which I knew) but that it couldn’t fix them, let alone quarantine them, or move uncorrupted data out of there.

Told ya its useless.

Before that, of course, in the November previous, an attempt to copy the contents of my hard drive over to another disc drive failed when it hit a slightly oddly named file, buggered up completely, and I ended up losing 6Gig of data. For those of you who don’t quite know, that’s something like 20,000 naked women. That’s 20,000 women. For those Irfanviewheads out there.

And of course, there’s nothing I can do about it. No way I can try and restore the data. So I’m stuck with a load of useless old tosh masquerading as a computer, a boiled, melted floppy disc drive, a two-tone monitor, and probably a clockwork wind-up CPU. It gave me a lot of pleasure to throw that entire computer into the trash.

I’m not even going to mention the time that my very first computer kept restarting itself at random intervals, long before it finally bit the dust and one day tried to restart but ended up doing a full stop. Talk about a crash.

Am I simply the world’s unluckiest man when it comes to computers? Maybe. I hope not, but I’m beginning to think that Bill Gates has cursed me. That wouldn’t surprise me. Computers drive me mad. I’m not some technophobe, nor some Amishboy Luddite living in the past, I know computers, I understand them, and what I’m meant to do to keep them working. The simple fact of the matter is that every computer I’ve had, even those allegedly superstable Work-Models have crashed on me repeatedly. The current novel I’ve been working on has seen six disc crashes in the past 19 months, and I’m getting a little tired of it now, to say the least. Even Japan’s legendarily unstable and dangerous earthquake fault is more stable than that.

Goddamit, you know what really irks me. Not just the fact that computers are so darn expensive, no, it’s the fact that they are so unreliable. I just want something to do what its meant to do. When it’s meant to do it. That’s all. I’m not asking for the moon or the stars, just for some reliability. Or at the very least an error message I can understand, not just a blue screen and a string of numbers. I don’t talk computers. I’m human.

Still, I wonder what exactly it will take Bill Gates to realise that he’s a pornographer, peddling overpriced rubbish to the world. What will take? For the computer running the plane he’s flying to crash? For the airplane to hit the Blue Screen Of Death, an unautheticated exception error at port AE00:00:00:01:76 before he realises just how frustrating, how infuriating, how damn amateurish it is, when his systems crash, go belly up, and there’s nothing he can do about it? Of course, one could say its revenge. But far from me to be so childish. Of course, it won’t be revenge. It’ll be electronic terrorism in the electronic war waged on the people by Microshite. And if you’re not with us, (and my God, you aren’t with us Mr.Gates) then you’re against us.

Mr Gates, Your limo is here to take you to Guanatemo Bay… We charge you with wasting our time, losing our data, screwing up our lives and holding the human race back, because you’re a peddler of cheap, amateurish rubbish that somehow manages to enslave the whole of the computerised world. Microsoft is the virus, and it’s running unchecked across the country.

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