vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #165 / Social life / Reading article...

I belong to the category of people who are absolutely not able to deal with high-tech equipment. Everything seems to dislike me.

Over the three years since I bought my TV set and videocassette recorder, I have invested half of their price into repairs. My washing machine wouldn’t wash if I didn’t stand next to it pouring in water from a three-liter jar. If I go away when it needs water, the old girl starts hissing and threatens to break completely.

However, the worst beast I have to tame is my computer at work. The company provided me with a computer which my former editor called a “steam-driven machine” — one of those monsters the computer guys look upon with disgust.

However, it does respect itself: 15 minutes after I press the on button, it decides that it is ready to work and strikes a chord of solemn music that makes everyone shudder.

There is a cheerful ghost living in it, too. Without any particular reason it may give certain words different colors — violet, yellow or green.

Sometimes, when it is in a special mood, the whole text will come out violet. It also likes to copy the program I am working in, and when I have two Word icons on the screen it hides my file and says that I can’t work in two similar programs at the same time.

It doesn’t like discs, especially if their labels are red or blue. It just refuses to read them. When I type text in my computer and bring it to our computer guy, he can’t read it in his Pentium without major transformations. (I am not even speaking about the strange letters, dollar signs and little squares my computer likes to decorate the files with.) So, I get the brunt of his irritation with my machine.

Every time he asks me, “What program do you work in?” Every time I say, “In whatever program you installed in my machine!”

I guess I inherited this technological incompetence from my mother. She started to work on a computer last year — in one’s late fifties things are even worse. After fighting with the body of her text, which moved back and forth on the screen, she figured out how to fix it.

But the next day her husband asked her with an expression of a NKVD interrogator, “What have you done to the computer, my dear?”

He just found pieces of her teacher’s manual inside his article on biologically active substances.