Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Little Boxes, Little Boxes ...

I now truly understand hell. Hell is the place you land as soon as your computer declares its independence. You tell it to delete a photo. It says, “No thank you.” You try to move to the next photo. It assumes a posture of defiance and announces that it most emphatically will NOT. And then for good measure it adds that just in case you’re thinking of renaming all these photos, think again, Missy. After about a week of contrariness I finally decided to take matters in hand. Because I am forever hearing about the need for “cleaning up your computer “(the occasional spritz of Trader Joe’s Cleaniness Is Next to Godliness apparently doesn't count) I broke down and spent almost $40 on Norton Utilities which provides 15 services such as optimization and defragmentation, all of which sounds soothingly medicinal.
As soon as I downloaded  the magic software  the bad news appeared. My computer was not balky because it’s old (almost four years) and cranky, but because it’s sick – overall health Poor. So I begin running  the fifteen utilities and gradually -- oh so gradually --I rise to medium health and then onward and upward to High Health. Alrighty then, am I smart, or what? So I close it out and head happily off to my Pictures program prepared to slam book photos at Abebooks until they scream for mercy. All I can say is, there are times when glowing health does not displace crabbiness. This was one of them.

So now what? I’m completely out of home remedies and have the computer skills of a chimpanzee. All  I can do is bite the bullet and call the boys from Brunswick, Larry and Shawn of Net Effects, who have bailed me out more times than I can count. In fact, they never even need to figure who I am when I call – they KNOW and it’s not just because of the frequency of my problems  either. I think a certain amount of computer stupidity is in there too.  Anyway, I talk to Larry, feeling pretty pleased with myself for have taken the problem as far as I have on my own. Who can argue with such a gargantuan leap of computer well-being performed without assistance by a book geek, huh?  

Larry.

“NOT a good idea,” he tells me. “The program duplicates what Windows already provides on your computer (like who knew THAT?) and the two programs end up fighting with each other.”

“But it’s NORTON,” I protest. “Norton’s the gold standard.”

“Yes, for virus protection, but not for this.”

I KNOW, I know. This is Larry talking here, but I still find this hard to believe. Anyone who watched the program’s multi-colored grid go from a scattered mess to rows of neat, orderly, pink, blue and yellow boxes lined up with the precision of a Rockettes' kick line would feel compelled to defend poor  Norton. But Larry wasn’t buying. Shawn either.  So I decide to let it go, sit back in my fabulous  purple chair and watch as Larry takes control of my computer from afar. Mysterious hidden diagnostics suddenly appear from behind  never-explored icons, spilling numbers, letters, and symbols like glitter across the screen. I watch this display in rapt fascination until I see 97 problems appear in the first fifteen seconds. After that it gets a bit jumbled, but somehow we meet up with the ominous BLUE SCREEN.

“Uh-oh,” says Larry.

“Did we just crash?” I ask.

“Might have,” he says.

Oddly, I don’t panic. Instead I calmly calculate the cost of a new computer, decide it can still be done for under $2000 and resign myself to my dismal fate. Only wait! We have not crashed after all. Or we did and then we recovered. Either way we’re back up and Larry is deleting stuff I’ve never seen before. To make a long story short my computer had a parasite, a malicious cyber tapeworm which ate up the functionality of my Pictures program and was  introduced by some sort of grocery coupon site. It’s pretty funny considering that I’m lucky to get to the grocery at all, much less with a checkbook. If I have a list we consider it a red letter day. But if I ever slouched  into  Buehler's clutching a wad of crumpled coupons the entire place would erupt with more shock than it did the day a deer wandered in. Which of course leaves one big question -- how did a grocery coupon site take up residence on my hard drive anyway?

“When something on the internet says it’s free, it’s not,” Larry says in  the voice of a sage.

I believe him. I really do.  And why shouldn't I? My computer works again,  I either didn’t crash or  survived a crash,  I didn’t have to spend a bunch of money I can ill afford, and I can once again upload pictures to ABE. I even believe him about the Norton Utilities program. Sort of.

The little pink, blue and yellow  boxes may be made of ticky-tacky, but whatever else might be said of them, they still put on a damn good show.

I bet the Rockettes would back me up on that.

2 comments:

Hilda said...

I am so glad I am not the only one that must call a "Larry" to save my computer from annihilation.

tess said...

Oh, I hear you, Hilda. I feel like the dumbest person on earth when it comes to broken computers. We should be thankful for all the Larrys of the world!