Via bound by gravity who has an excellent link round up (including one from me) we find Jay Currie’s herculean struggle to raise a computer from the dead.

At a certain point, after prayer has failed, after promising to raise your first born as a geek has gone nowhere, after you have lost track of where the working hard drive is currently wired, a perfectly marvelous calm creeps over your hunched and hurting shoulders. You achieve a certain detachment from the @#$#% box. Most of your data is backed up, you have hacked your way down to the lost Win 98 product key, you have booted from a dusty CD to a rusty spare hard drive and it’s worked. To your great surprise the box is working. Admitedly with, of all things, an invalid Recycle Bin error. But that beats the Hell out of “Fatal Exception 0028:C002EEE9 VxD NT KERN (01)” glinting at you maliciously from your dead box.

So, in triumph, you walk up the stairs to bring word of the resurection to your family whose very livlihood is hanging by a bug fix. A bounce in your step you arrive.

“Da Da” calls out your one year old who has not seen you for three days as you labour over the collision between an ancient box and software written by Polish logic chopping demons. Real enthusiasm there.

Your four year old is more blase…”Did you get Chicken Invaders” to work?”

The little imps’ mother, serene in the face of unending descriptions of missing drivers and strange errors which cannot be found on mighty Google, in a voice struggling to mask brute superiority, greets the geeky warrior,

“So, when are you getting a Mac?”

Soon darling, soon.

I’ve never had a Mac and I have owned a computer since 1987. Of course I have never been through the type of ordeal that Jay just described. Probably because I don’t have the knowledge beyond swapping in sound and video cards and installing a hardrive. Probably a good thing though.

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