Oh, look, I'm angry again.

Whoo, it;s been a long time since I was irritated enough to blog. Time to get back into it, I guess.


We know there are man y people who piss me off.

We know that technology pisses me off.

Combine the two? Go on and guess what you get. (No, not cyborgs. ):)

You get people who berate you for getting angry with technology.

I'll sit back and let you think about it. Then, I'll spell it out for you.

This is a scene in my Multimedia classroom.

I boot up the PC. Oh, no wait, something's wrong. It's taking me to an alternate setup menu. None of the options make much sense to me, so I restart. Twice. Same old. At this point, I swear. Not loudly. Some guy (Let's call him Marcus) frowns at me.

I start navigating my way through the maze of options. I hit a likley looking button and the computer shuts down. Oh, no wrong one.
"Dammnit, stupid computer. Just WORK!"
More frowns.

Restart the computer, and after more tries and failings, it works. Don't know how, but it works.
I mutter something about how it would have been easier if it had worked the first time, and Marcus says:
"What is youyr problem?"
"Computer wouldn't startup."
"Well, it's fine NOW, isn't it?"
"Umm. yea. Yes, yes it is. And it was painful to get it to work."
"You shouldn't be so ungratefull."
And he turns away.

What's THAT supposed to mean? I have work that needs doing, on a 5 year old shitheap of a computer, and it won't start. I'm not gratefull for having it.
I'm gratefull for my quadcore, not so gratefull for this ... machine.

So I boot up, and navigate my way through to the CS3 suite on the start menu, and a popup comes up, down goes the start menu. Given that it took me about five minutes to get that far (the computer is slow as hell for the first ten, twenty minutes of use) I swear, close the popup and repeat. I open CS3 and wait. The initialization popup appears. Freezes. More swearing.

Now, I can feel a hole being drilled into the back of my skull here. I turn around and sure enough, I'm being stared down by Marcus.
"What?"
No reply.
"Stop that, it's creepy."
"Well you stop being such a whiny bitch."
"Whiny bitch?"
"All you've done for the past half an hour is complain about your computer. Maybe you don't want to USE your computer?"
At this point, my only contribution to the conversation is an incredulous laugh. Some technologically illiterate weirdo is having a go at me for not liking a malfunctioning pile of aeroplane debris.

"Seriously, answer me!"
"I've got better things to do than listen to you. Things like making this peice of junk work."
"It's not a peice of JUNK, it's a computer."
'It's a tiny peice of crap. Now hush."

I work my way through to the program I want and get several minutes worth of work done, try and save to a previous versions file type for compatability, and it takes me through a five step torture process. This, obviously, causes much swearing. Adobe HATES backwards compatability.

So, nearer end of the lesson, I'm about to hit save and log off, when my screen goes black. The computer dies. I swear loudly and check the connections, and sure enough, one of them is lose. Marcus, the ever so helpfull soul, has decided I dont want to use the computer after all. HE pulled the power.

You can imagine the aftermath of that, but the tale of how I almost got a level 2 is a one for another time.