AND THERE, JAMMED in the S-bend of the LaserWriter's paper path, he found the crumpled Photoshop image of a hook!"
The dozen or so computer geeks in the hotel suite exchanged groans. Getting together after the conference to swap horror stories was a group tradition that went all the way back to InterCon '91, and stories that were both new and genuinely horrifying were rare.
"Pretty lame, Roger," Sheila pronounced, getting up and crossing the room. "That wasn't even scary. Besides, the way I heard the story, the paper just said, `I Told You Not To Install Open Transport.'" She threaded a beer out of the minifridge and returned to her seat.
"Hey, what about Andy?!" she said, turning to me. "What have you got for us?"
My eyes remained on the beads of condensation on my can of Dr. Pepper. I'd hoped to avoid active participation this year, but my peripheral vision confirmed that I had the attention of the entire room.
I cleared my throat. "I've got only one real horror story. But I don't want to tell it, and I don't think you guys could handle it. It's absolutely ghastly -- and it really happened."
I meant what I said, but my response only electrified the group.
My mouth had gone dry, so I took another swig, swallowing so fast that the carbonation burned my throat. "Well, you know how it is," I mused, leaning back. "You always want to hear a good horror story, but in the back of your mind you know it'll probably be something incredibly lame involving a hook." Roger cleared his throat and announced he was going out for some more ice. "But there's always the risk that you'll hear something that just shivers you right to the marrow."
Sheila pulled her chair in closer. "Dish."
I set my soda down on the end table. "OK... but remember, this is an absolutely true story. We're all friends here, and adults in some fashion or another," I began. "We have our favorite operating systems, and although we may kid around with each other, deep down we all respect each other's choices, right?"
Everyone nodded.
"This is not our story. This is a story from the front lines of the user-interface wars, where the battles are bloody, the stakes high, and the injuries deep. It concerns a kid I'll call Sparky. He goes to a public high school in Maine, where `official' student computers are all Windows machines."
"oooOOOOOOooooooo... scary!" a Mac developer laughed. He received a dozen icy stares as a reward.
"But the school had managed to acquire half a dozen Macs," I continued, unruffled, "mainly through donations from local colleges and organizations. They were mostly SEs, but they had some LCs and a perfectly good LaserWriter NT too... functional and useful.
"This year, the school upgraded all its PC hardware. In the process, all the Macs were disconnected and exiled to a storage closet. But Sparky, valiant front-line Mac evangelist he is, obtained some unused space in the school and, through lots of scrounging and hard work, set up a fully networked Macintosh lab all by himself. It wasn't long, however, before the school's computer club found it and made its contribution."
I stood, to pace and gesture. "Consisting solely of Windows xenophobes, this so-called club usually spent its meetings eating doughnuts and playing Doom II. But on one fateful day, they decided on a different activity: to destroy the Mac lab."
"What do you mean, `destroy'?" Sheila asked.
"I mean destroy. . . what Rome did to Carthage. Sparky wasn't there, but the aftermath was pretty clear. ImageWriters thrown to the floor and smashed. SE screens and cases cracked. Machines taken completely apart. Someone did a little dance on the LaserWriter, and a whole bunch of hardware -- including an LC III -- just plain vanished. Well, not entirely," I corrected myself. "About $400 worth of Mac SIMMs reappeared a couple of weeks later as a set of wind chimes in the PC lab."
"So what did the school do when Sparky reported this?" a Windows product manager asked, quietly.
I retrieved my soda. "His principal and vice principal left the matter to the two teachers in charge of computing: the Evil Twins."
"Huh?" Sheila asked.
"Sparky's term, not mine," I replied. "The Twins, both unapologetic Mac haters, took absolutely no action, disciplinary or otherwise, aside from naming the lab `The Mac Graveyard.' Sparky tried to put the machines back together, but wires had been cut and parts smashed."
There was silence. Finally, a Webmaster spoke. "Damn... I mean, what if the literature club went and burned all the foreign-language books in the school library?" she asked. "The administration just doesn't care?"
I drained the rest of my drink. "Nope. When Sparky e-mailed me the story, I sent back a long and reasoned message about the importance of diversity in computer education, hoping he'd forward it to the Twins. He forwarded back their reply, which ended, quote, `He is an angry pantload. Forget him, and fall in love with Windows! Just kidding!' Got me so mad that I started phoning around... and Power Computing, bless 'em, decided to give Sparky a nice, hot Power Mac clone.
"Still, these acts of platform bigotry are like cockroaches," I sighed, lofting the empty can across the room. "For every one you see, there are a hundred more you don't." It hit the rim of the wastebasket and skittered away.
And there was more silence. And then we stopped telling horror stories.
