"Me and My Computer"

The first computer we had was a Tandy made several years back that was loaned to us by my niece. I had never worked with computers much up until then and, to emphasize the point, I still have trouble with the phrase "burn a CD". It was the hubby who told me that it has nothing to do with matches.

I had always been taught that, with most things, you burn them because they aren't any good anymore. Now, with this new computer language, it seems that you buy something (a CD) and, while it is still new, you "burn" something else onto it (data/information of some kind) and AFTER it has been burned is when you really get the most use out of it. I am left thinking, "Okie dokie!"

Needless to say, I was soon having great fun with the Tandy's draw program! Or WAS I? Well, it was fun most of the time but, sometimes, things just had this way of getting really WEIRD. At least, they do when I am at the computer.

At this point in my brainless little story, I recant an evening, sometime after midnight, when weird would have been a drastic understatement. I was working with the draw program and I was right in the middle of drawing a picture of a nice little meadow. ... Oh, it was turning out to be quite lovely really!

The picture was of a huge field of grass that was some of the greenest, most beautiful grass you would ever see! Right in the middle of this field, there was a little pond with pretty little flowers all around it, tall trees of all kinds here and there, some with even prettier little flowers growing around the base of them, and, in the open spaces without trees, there were scattered patches of flowers that looked very much like sweet little crocuses! Mixed in with those flowers were cute little mushrooms of all colors imaginable! I had even gone to the effort of putting a radiant sun, clouds that looked like giant balls of the whitest, puffiest cotton and a distant flock of birds that appeared to be flying in the blue, blue sky!

Then, something went wrong. My picture vanished and, in its place, the computer started drawing a picture of its OWN! It wasn't even a good picture at that! It was this square thing with this really ugly red pattern on the inside that had lines going through it horizontally and vertically, making a kind of graph of the thing, and the lines were all in a pukey yellow color that very much resembled the color of "fresh-from-the-factory" calf manure.

I frantically started moving the mouse and clicking on this and that, whatever I could find, in an effort to make it stop but it would NOT! It just kept right on drawing that horrid picture! I yelled, "Hey! What the heck do you think you're doing? I'm the artist here, all right?!"

Of course, the computer did not heed my words. So, in something akin to submission, I sat back in my chair and watched as it continued to draw, glancing over my shoulder now and then, almost expecting to find Rod Serling standing there with that mysterious look on his face and saying, "There's a sign post up ahead! Your next stop, 'The Twilight Zone'!" There were a couple of times there that I could almost feel his breath on the back of my neck.

The ashtray that was sitting right beside the mouse pad suddenly made a loud, popping sound! As it did so, the ashtray vibrated violently, throwing ashes and cigarette butts everywhere!

However, by this time I was ready for just about anything so, when that happened, I didn't even flinch a muscle or bat an eye. I just continued to sit there for a few moments, staring at the monitor and ashtray in turns, collecting and sorting out in my mind what had just transpired.

Finally, I very calmly got up out of my chair, pushing in the extending shelf that the keyboard was sitting on as I did so, and I reached down to turn the computer off myself as it had refused to shut down in the proper fashion. Then, I turned off the monitor and, stopping only to clean up the scattered ashes and cigarette butts, I turned around and walked across the room, turned out the lights as I left the room, and I WENT TO BED!

Upon investigation, I found out the next day what had caused the ashtray to behave in such an unusual manner. Being made of a hard plastic but, obviously, not a very durable one, it had cracked in the bottom center. It must have been that the enamel coating on the plastic had worn thin and the heat of a cigarette had caused it to suddenly expand, crack and, in so doing, that had resulted in the ashtray vibrating, thereby throwing its contents askew.

Therefore, I realized with what was almost like a kind of disappointment of a sorts, that Rod Serling had not visited me the night before after all. ... Oh, well, maybe next time.

One night I was working or, maybe, I should say that I was playing with the draw program on the Tandy computer and I went to save the picture that I had just finished drawing. It was a picture of balloons and the computer told me that I had to name my masterpiece in order to save it. Well, doofus here didn't know at the time that there was a limit as to the length of that name. Because the message the computer gave me just said "Invalid" and I didn't know the reason it was invalid, I made several attempts to name this work of art of mine, all of which were in vain, and soon I began to get a bit irate.

Finally, in a state of determined anger, I typed in the words "Balloons.Com" while thinking to myself, "Uh huh! I'll show you that I know a bit of computer language, too!" Well, the picture just DISAPPEARED! When I typed in that name, I did so with an evil grin on my face and while laughing a menacing laugh. However, when I couldn't find the picture right after that, I stopped laughing and the grin on my face disappeared as well!

I never saw that picture again and it occurred to me that it was kind of apt that it was a picture of balloons as they must have just "flown away". When I told the hubby this, he said with a smile and a laugh that "Mr. DOS" (in the computer) would later be doing its thing and suddenly it would think, "There goes a BALLOON!"

I had been working on the picture for 2-3 days off and on and it wasn’t a picture of just an ordinary fish either, but was of a particular type of goldfish. It was a chocolate-colored, fancy-finned Oranda no less. I had even gotten a book that I had out to use as a guide and the picture was PERFECT!

The hubby came home right after it happened and he heard me in the bathroom griping about it still. I was saying, "You (the computer) ATE my fish! I had been working on that fish for DAYS and you just ATE it! ... Yeah, well, ... " (I was coming out of the bathroom at that time to find my husband standing just outside of the door with one of those "What now?" looks on his face.) " ... I'm going to get my fish back, if I have to get it out of you with a CROWBAR!"

Then, I just looked at my husband and, without missing a beat, I said, "Hey, Babe! I didn't know you were back. How was your mother?" Then, I stomped my way back into the room with the computer, resuming my ranting as though it had never been interrupted in the first place.

Then came the day that we purchased a new Dell Computer and went online for the first time. Let the games begin!

I was chatting on the internet one night and, as I was typing a message, I hit the wrong key. Whatever key I hit caused the chat page to expand to where it took up the whole screen. I put a message over the main chat line saying "HELP!" and what I had done. Then, the next message from me was that I had fixed it all by my little ol' self. I still do not know what key I hit to cause that to happen but, at the time, I thought I was going to have to do a forced shutdown or something.

Another time in chat, I hit the wrong key and suddenly there was FRUIT all over the monitor screen! I have NO idea where the fruit came from and, while I think I have done that twice and I seem to recall that there was a picture of a very nice pineapple in amongst the fruit, I have not seen the fruit since!

In trying to figure out what caused the fruit to appear right there before my eyes like that, it occurred to me that I might possibly have unknowingly accessed a website of some kind. Now, with that thought in mind, my imagination began to run wild with me and I shuddered at the thought of what could have ended up plastered all over the screen in the place of the fruit had it been another, much BOLDER website!

I got up early one morning and, just as I always do, I came be-bopping in here to the computer. The hubby had worked feverishly for hours the night before in an effort to work out the bugs that had resulted when he installed our new Windows XP-Professional Program. As such, I had been away from the computer for what was, for me, an extended length of time and I was eager to get to it and catch up.

So, sleepily, I pushed in the little button down there to fire this baby up, but no dice! I got only a blank screen with the following message, "NSTLR (or something to that nature) is missing. Press any key to start computer."

I thought, "Ok, I know how to do that", and I did just as the computer had told me to do and pressed a key at random on the keyboard. Still, nothing but the blank screen and a repeat of the before mentioned message. So, I pressed another key. STILL nothing! (By then, I was beginning to lose it!) I repeated my efforts a few more times and finally, in a state of passionate anger, I started singing, while typing on the keyboard.

What I found out later is that the hubby had left a floppy disk in the computer and, as he put it, when I attempted to fire up the computer with the disk in there, it had "blown the computer's mind". Well, anyone who knows me well, knows NOT to mess with me when I have been sleeping.

So, I can still see myself sitting at this computer that morning, typing the alphabet with a rising fury, glancing up now and then to see the message on the screen being repeated by the computer which, I know for a fact, was having a heck of a time keeping up with me, and singing along with that which I typed, ...

"A, B, C, D, E, F, G, ... H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, ... Q, R, S, ... T, U, V, ... W, ... X, ... Y .. & ... Z! Now, I've said my ABCs! Here is what I think of thee!" Of course, at the precise moment that I sang, "Here is what I think of THEE!", I gave the monitor screen a sneer and the bird!

As a further highlight to this chapter of my story, when I later went into an MSN chat room and was telling other chatters about my singing the song to the computer and flipping it off, that was when one of the bots or something decided to do a maintenance of some kind. Just after typing the above paragraph and posting it on the main, suddenly, there followed a message saying "MSN Screen Cleaning" and the whole chat page went blank!

It's approximately 3:30AM, Monday, April 07, 2003, and I am transferring pictures that I have saved in My Pictures onto a CD for safe keeping until future use. I see something is wrong with a particular picture and, because I am tired and half asleep, it takes me a bit of time to figure out what it is. I am thinking, "What is wrong with this picture???"

What I have before me is a picture of a leprechaun holding a pipe with the words "Happy St. Patrick's Day" written beside the little guy. And, there in the background, ... huh? What is THAT?! ... Well, danged if it isn't Charles Shultz's "Peanut's" character "Woodstock" pushing a shopping cart! I didn't know that bird was into celebrating St. Patrick's Day! Easter, maybe, because a bird lays eggs and kids have egg hunts on Easter. Grant it, maybe even Halloween because some kids might like to dress up to look like Woodstock. But ST. PATRICK'S DAY?! Nah, I don't think so!

One day, a fly that had been pestering me for what seemed like hours landed on my keyboard and I swatted at it before I thought about it. I missed the fly, but I didn't miss the keyboard. I hit the wrong thing and, for some reason, it closed out most of my windows!

Then, trying to ignore the fly and getting back to whatever it was that I was doing at the time, the fly again whizzed past my face and soon landed on the desk. Again, without thinking about it first, I swatted at the fly with a package of sugar wafers. It broke every one of the wafers and I still missed the fly!

The fly was getting on my last nerve. I simply could not handle this kind of stress! He just kept coming back for more. I didn't know what to do.

I thought to myself, "If I walked outside, would he follow me? ... Nah, then all of his relatives would come inside in his place."

Then, I had what I thought was a good idea. So, I went into the bathroom, called him, "Here, little fly! Come to Lonza!" and he followed me! I quickly stepped out of the bathroom and shut the door. HE FLEW OUT FROM UNDER THE DOOR!!!!!

I finally got the fly by swatting him with my hand. Grant it, I got fly guts all over my hand and had to go wash it off, but it was worth it. ...

It was on a Saturday night, right before midnight, and it had just taken me 30 MINUTES to save one Garfield cartoon onto a CD. I was irate by that time and I had this kind of half-crazed grin pasted on my face that showed my teeth as I calmly got out of my chair and walked out of the room. I guess James, who was in there with me at the time, thought I was going to the bathroom or something. I don't know for sure what he was thinking. I just know he had this really surprised look on his face when I calmly walked back into the room to the computer carrying my .22 Remington revolver that my father had bought for me, carefully checking to make sure it was loaded.

James was right in the middle of the usual with his computer which consisted of "fixing" his computer by completely taking it apart a few dozen times, cursing at it and banging on it. I think that's why his tools were made up of a screw driver and a hammer.

When James looked up from his nightly ritual, I looked into his flabbergasted face and said, "Just grab the dog and get OUT of the way! I'm going to KILL IT and put myself out of my misery!"

Then, just as my luck would have it, James proceeded to do something that I really HATE with a passion. He proceeded to talk some LOGIC into my head! When a person is really, really angry, the very last thing in the world they want to hear is logic.

James said, "Well, if you do that, it will be a while before we can afford to buy another computer." My hopes and dreams began to fall. Then, he added, "Not only that, but it is almost midnight and we live in the city limits; someone will call the police."

My hopes and dreams for my sanity at last were shattered. I could just picture myself sitting in some jail cell awaiting my trial while having to fend off the advances of some woman who was built like a bulldozer, had the IQ of a tadpole, the face of a bull dog and had somehow taken "a-liking" to my short self.

Oh, there are many other such crazy things that have happened to me and that have been done by me while at the helm of this computer. Now, in retrospect, I think what a shame it is that I didn’t think to keep a diary about it.

Like the time that I had to send an apologetic e-mail to a minister for the slightly off-color joke that I had mistakenly sent to him. To make matters worse, this minister was preaching at a church in the little community where I grew up.

There was also the time that I had to send another such apology to someone as a result of an e-mail that I sent to them when I had been drinking. You would think that I would know better than to operate a computer while under the influence, now, wouldn’t you?

Since, as they say, "history tends to repeat itself", I won’t fool myself into thinking that there is not the possibility of even more and, possibly, even nuttier things in store for me in the future. So, my advice to you, Internet Pal O’ Mine, is to stay tuned to this same station until a time in the possibly not-too-distant future when I have more such stories to share with you!

Lonza J. Farkas

Saturday, September 28, 2002

Last amended, revised or whatever the heck you call it on

Wednesday, September 29, 2004