KAPUT KOMPUTER

Nine days ago, my trusty—at least I considered it trusty—old Asus computer went kaput. Just stopped right in the middle of whatever. I tried restarting. Several times. Each time it said, “Cannot restart.” Finally, it said, “Forget it, old man! You’ve had it.”

In some ways, it came at a fortuitous time. I always back up all my computer doings immediately on a push drive, so I wasn’t fearful of losing any precious, or otherwise, material. I was going to have to get Windows 10 before January, anyway, since Microsoft is doing away with my beloved Windows 7 then. [“Beloved” because I ALREADY know how to use it.]

But why get another computer at all? I have an iphone and an ipad. I can get email on them, and look up unnecessary info on the web. I don’t write anymore, so I don’t need a big keyboard or a word processing program.

Most importantly, I just did not want to have to learn a new system. I’m old. I’ll probably die as soon as I figure out how to turn the durn thing on, yet alone figure out how to avoid playing Candy Crush while on my way to find football scores.

But all that stuff I had backed up I could not get at minus a computer, and Helen had already purchased a new one with Windows 10 just a couple of months ago, so surely she could help me in my transition. [The counter argument: If she finds out how incompetent I really am, she might just go ahead and put me in “the home.”]

So I bought a computer just like Helen’s. Now she is worried that we might get them mixed up. Like I have files labeled Pier 1 and Penzy’s Spices.

 John Robert McFarland

And don’t tell me I should have had a Mac. We used Macs for years. When mine went kaput, it did lose much of my material, even though I had it backed up, because it wouldn’t “translate,” and the nearest place that would work on fixing a Mac was in Kazakhstan, and they charged me a lot of money for fixes that didn’t work, and $2000 for a new computer, and when the email program on it wouldn’t work, Apple’s suggestion was to buy Eudora for another $200 rather than for them to make their durn program work, so I bought my trusty Asus for the $200 it would take to get working email alone via the Mac, even though it meant learning a new program… ah, a new program… gaahh, no!!!