Ghost in The Machine


The machine came back from rehab and everything was fine. Brilliant actually. The machine is running faster and everything was good. It was nice to have it back. The stint in rehab was just what the doctor ordered, cleansed it of all the spy ware and joke ware and all the other uninvited guests that had been making the machine hang around street corners at all hours and vandalizing the neighborhood.

So. Machine came back. Really self involved, but that’s a rehab thing, it’s all about them because its all about them. You have to wait this out and be glad they aren’t dead in some ditch or appearing in reality shows.

But. The clock was wrong. Not very wrong, like seven or eight minutes. I would change it and it would change back. Kind of a pain, but it had been doing that for a while and I got used to it. Then. Then, I went to my browser and it was wonky. It was text only . I’m not text only. I wanted my HTML. So I went to the task bar and fooled around until I found the right sequence of buttons to push and it went back. Until I wanted to go to another page or navigate inside the same site. Over and freaking over.

I went to work and talked to the computer person. She was puzzled. She suggested I go to Microsoft and check out the Knowledge Base. You can’t even ask a question there unless you have some idea why your problem is happening. And it helps if you speak geek. My geek is rusty. So my problem stuck around.

Right Round Baby Right Round Like A Record Player Right Round Round. You spin me right… Okay! I start to firm up my Buy A New Computer With My Tax Rebate plan . It’s a good plan.

I was trying to go check my email and the machine was making its working wrrrr, a lot. It was just an email. Wrrrrrrr. Wrrrrrr. Wrrrrrrr. I look at the bottom of the screen, Authorizing . Authorizing? Authorizing what? So I clicked on it and made it stop. The machine crashed. Damn.

While it was in rehab the guy that worked on it made all the umpteen programs that I had stupidly set to start at start up, to not not start. This is cool. It makes start up really fast and for the first time in a long time I didn’t have to enter through a handful of messages telling me that programs I had uninstalled and reinstalled were not there. This made me happy.

Well. When it came back up this time all those annoying messages were there again plus some more. Damn. And all the programs were running on start up again. Another Damn. And now the kewl antivirus software they gave the machine at rehab suddenly wants me to give it a password! I don’t have a password! Damn! Damn!Damn!


But. My browser is back to its old default and I can see pictures and color again, the clock works! and I didn’t have to do the whole reset thing 30-40 times every time I want to do something… I’m going to call the rehab place and get a password for my kewl new antivirus toy. You would be surprised what I will put up with for a working clock.