My Friends, with Your Indulgence, I would like to broaden the scope of this column a tad; nudge its topical parameters just enough to the left and right to answer, strictly as a public service, mind you, a fundamental and troubling question regarding the ineffable nature of the infinite and expanding Universe and Humanity's relationship within it. The ineffable nature of the infinite and expanding Universe is to be a profoundly rotten bastard to the innocent simps struggling for survival inside it. The Universe is about as calm and mature as a nine-year-old boy who has just been told that McDonald's is all out of the Action X-Men Happy Meal toys and that all it has left are Legends of the PGA Senior Tour sweatbands -- and, brothers and sisters, we're the ones who promised the infinite and ineffable Universe a Wolverine Sup-R-Slash Cycle if he finished his homework early.
Right about now, the more astute of you are probably toying with the theory that at the moment, I might be crawling out from the wreckage of a startling and unpleasant experience with my Mac. Run with that thought, because, yes, on the day this column was due -- during the very month when due to a family emergency, I had to be given a long extension on my deadline -- my trusty Apple 13-inch RGB decided that four years of displaying my self-indulgent pop-culture references was enough. The column, which was one simple edit away from completion, was on that Mac. It was the only Mac monitor in the house at the time, none of my so-called friends would loan me theirs, the Mac-to-VGA adapter I drove to New Hampshire for didn't work, and I couldn't start File Sharing by blindly typing and clicking (although I tried).
This has had not a small effect upon my outlook on life, as you have guessed. Let me now share with you my thoughts on hardware failures. First and foremost, for heaven's sake, don't make the same mistake I made yesterday. My entire system was up and running just fine, and I even had a bunch of documents open and waiting for me. So what did I do? I shut the machine down for the night -- it's a classic case of not leaving well enough alone. Why did I shut it down? To save electricity, of all things, when everyone knows that by keeping dozens of high-load appliances on around the clock, we help pump bucketloads of valuable ozone back into our atmosphere, where it belongs.
The second-biggest mistake you can make is to actually turn the thing on; it's the leading cause of system failure. Because Karma, as I've noted before, is a bewildering and savage thing. Oh, it's real all right. It watches silently as you perform memory upgrades without properly grounding yourself beforehand. Every time I did something inadvisable to the motherboard with a soldering iron; every time I unplugged an AppleTalk, ADB, or -- yes -- even SCSI cable without first powering down the entire system; every time I cleaned a dirty NuBus card by tossing it into the dishwasher, Karma was there, taking photos and silently biding its time.
See, metaphysically slapping your hand as the immediate punishment for having done something foolish is beneath Karma. "After all, you do already have a mother," Karma laughs, taking another drag from its cigarillo. No, Karma's style is to cause the entire world to come crashing down upon you because you ultimately did something simple and harmless. Karma got me for flipping a power switch. It got a good friend of mine for merely reaching for his mouse on a dry winter's day. Karma has all the time in the world, and it knows what you fear. Never underestimate Karma. As luck would have it, I've anonymously received via the Internet a list of Karma's favorite charities, and you can bet I'll be giving generously from now on.
Well, that pretty much covers the "Prevention" section of this special column on hardware malfunctions. Now let's talk about what to do after disaster strikes. What worked well for me was having had the forethought to invest in several good, cheap keyboards instead of one expensive, high-quality one. The malfunction had nothing to do with the keyboard, of course, but when I finally realized that I was well and truly hosed and that what with the sheer amount of frequent-flier miles my editor's accumulated and the ease with which one can purchase a handgun in a major city such as Boston, these might indeed be my final hours on God's green earth, I could act upon that impulse to slam my fist into the keyboard. Cheap keyboards are kind to the hands and shatter into a satisfying spray of key caps immediately upon impact, and after you've brushed all the springs and shards of plastic off the desk, you can simply walk into your closet and pull out another one. I'd recommend my own keyboard to you, but unfortunately, I can't find the corner of the thing that has the product logo. I think it's under the radiator.
Now, I don't want you people worrying yourselves about needless acts of mindless aggression. Just pull the keyboard out in front of you; take a deep cleansing breath; and when you start to feel that soothing wave of serenity wash over you, beat the pudding out of that thing quick, before the serenity overtakes you completely and talks you out of doing it. If computer companies didn't want you to do this, they wouldn't have sold the keyboard to you so cheaply. One area in which manufacturers excel is in preventing their users from injuring themselves so severely that their customer base begins to erode. That's why, for instance, every single piece of software you buy is accompanied by an inch-thick softbound manual. That way, when the impulse to pound your head against the table again and again inevitably overtakes you, the wide layer of manuals will be there to cushion the blow. The original IBM PC shipped with three hardbound three-ring binders, and as a recent article in a leading magazine has theorized, it was a sudden and shocking drop in customer base that gave Microsoft its first major toehold in market share.
So concerned is the Industry about stress-induced injuries taking potential customers out of the lineup that the IEEE actually developed mandatory guidelines for makers of portable computers, setting strict limits on the ratio of user-interface impenetrability to physical mass. Take the very first portable computer, the Osborne 1. Considering the CP/M operating system (in which the command for copying a file is PIP), the Industry imagined the untold horrors of hundreds of machines being heaved out of windows and raining down upon the terrorized populace, so Osborne was forced to make the machine the size and weight of a medium-sized desk, only without so many convenient handles. At the other end of the spectrum, we have Apple's Newton MessagePad. Its trivial size and weight are not a testament so much to its advanced engineering as to its friendly operating system. Although Newtons are smaller and lighter than a paperback Tom Clancy novel, the IEEE's standards board ultimately decided that the elegance of the Newton OS made the PDA's high throwability a trivial source of concern. During the summer of 1993, however, the IEEE did lobby heavily for sidewalks to be kept clear, as a nation of users struggled to teach their new Newtons to recognize their handwriting.
So here I am, finishing up this column on my faithful PowerBook, Lilith, with the phone off the hook. The massive, headline-grabbing political expose I had planned for this issue will have to wait until I manage to bring in a new monitor or get the old one working again. Of course, I could have simply cracked open my Writing Mac, torn out the hard drive holding that nearly completed column, and grabbed the file with Lilith and a temporary drive enclosure. That, unfortunately, is the sort of solution you come up with only after having written 1,000 words of a substitute column. Now if you'll excuse me, there's an open grave somewhere I have to leap into.
Assuming that Andy's friends and family stop him in time, Andy may be reached at andyi@world.std.com. Assuming that they don't, well, you'll always have the URL for Andy Ihnatko's Colossal Waste of Bandwidth: http://www.zdnet.com/~macuser/.
