Bradley's Buzz

Cursed Or Just Mental?

When I turn on a computer, it's always a bit of a crap shoot. Is it going to work for me? Is it going to stay on while I'm processing my endless projects into its hard drive or will it give me that insane strange blue screen telling me it must, simply must dump physical memory? Where does this dump occur? Why does this dump occur? Who asked my computer to do the dumping? I certainly didn't as I just explained I don't know what or where these items are dumped.

But within the last 24 hours it has occured to me that the computer virus that oozes from my fingertips causing computers to act out from here to Wisconsin, is not the only thing wrong with me. In fact, it seems every electronic device I own has it in for me.

That ever elusive blue screen dump has been happening on my computer at work for months now. No explicable reason, it just does what it wants to do I guess. I have no warning when it is going to occur and it's even become kind of a game, with me frantically working just so I can get things saved before the blue shows up.

Meanwhile, the computer I use at work is connected to the computer terminal directly behind me. It is at that computer my old boss used to download pictures of vintage guitars and probably porn. But lately it's been just me so the computer doesn't get much use. What I use it for is to work on while running my countless virus scans on my main computer. But suddenly this little network system I have is no longer working. In fact, the other computer won't even acknowledge mine exists. So when the CD reader on my computer stopped reading CDs yesterday, I tried to move all my stuff over there. Alas, the computer network and my CD reader are officially dead.

The computers at work have actually been a problem for awhile. But now even the CD player has turned against me. It is a 100 disc CD changer that for some inexplicable reason has decided to only play one disc at a time. It plays the CD I tell it to then it shuts off. Why? I don't know, it hasn't told me yet.

But if problems with electronics at work wasn't enough, the electronic rebellion is now following me home. The CD player in my car refuses to play CDs in a correct and timely manner. I have cleaned it over and over, yet when I throw in a CD it won't play it. It just stares at me as if I asked it to conjure up the spirit of Jim Morrisson instead of just playing a Doors CD. So I try and try and eventually if I'm very lucky, the CD player will in fact play a song. That is until I hit a bump in the road and the whole process starts over.

So I go home where I find the need to relax by sitting in my corner of the living room and doing my endless arts and crafts, writing and the like - all to my favorite tunes on the head phones while The Leivas watches his TV. But the frickin' CD player I have refuses to play the CDs either. I put the CD in, it looks at me like I asked it to conjure up... you get it.

I throw a fit, I hit the CD player. The Leivas takes a break and runs to the bathroom. So I sit down and relax again. Being the avid lover of TV, I try to keep everything I love on DVD. This means my DVD recorder gets a work out as I edit commercials and burn DVDs. Well imagine my utter surprise when the remote control to my DVD recorder decides it too is sick of me and will not fast forward correctly. I push that button until my thumb is black and blue but nothing. Which means it now takes me an hour and a half to edit out the commercials in a half hour sitcom. It takes ME this long, mind you. The Leivas can hit the fast forward button with no problems whatsoever.

Having had it with the remote control and CD player scandals, I run to the bedroom to hop onto the computer so I can create endless CD artwork, music and write until my little digits cramp up. For if a computer works, I am fairly savvy and can navigate and all that. But last night as I wrote a very clever first act to episode 10 of Carlton Heights, a blue screen came on and informed me that it must, simply must dump its physical memory!

Am I cursed? Am I technologically challenged or am I just plain retarded? I am trapped in a camp version of Stephen King's Maximum Overdrive where the world's electronics have banned together to send me into a mental hospital.

posted by swivek @ 12:23 PM