Our computers, their makers, our governments and our money-lenders have handed us a lousy game of chance - that has YET to play out…
What number was called? And who just won?
It’s all gone too far - this business of software and hardware, and hard, rotten shareware luck for the consumer!
Bill Gates, and Messer’s Hewlett and Packard - as well as you too, you damn fat, square-packaged, Gateway cow I‘m looking at now on the logo of my desktop, and the dastardly dilly-dallying Dell:
BEWARE!
An eruption of ill-confidence and consumer distrust percolates through our society.
We’ve had enough!
I’ve seen about enough of this damn “Vista” as I care to. So have my compatriots, tied to their computers as if to prove an old saying in ill-fated love affairs: “Women (or men): “You can’t live with ‘em, and you can’t live without ‘em!”
It might as well be apron strings we’re trying to break. Except these are strands made of wire instead of fabric, in the connectors I’ve never seen before. I keep trying to find the right ones with their strangely differing ends and plug them into the correct hole.
Most of the time, however, it seems that hardly ever does “tab A” fit into “slot B.”
This Christmas morning has gone awry - and daddy ain’t finding the right stuff under the tree - no matter where he looks - to fix it.
Santa Claus is likely to find no cookies beneath the tree’s bows which overhang the computer.
What is one to do?
No matter the season, when the body is ill, we look to every sort of remedy.
I’d consult a psychic if it would mean that my cyber-life would improve in the least.
But no one on the ‘other side’ seems to be talking to me of late.
No dreams, no predictions, no alchemy seem to be available to aid us in curing our current, electronically-sired as well as misfired prediction and predilection to technology.
It’s all playing out in a series of dots and dashes, in the on-and-off number system of base 2, 3, or whatever.
When I heard Gene Roddenberry speak at the University of Colorado, Boulder in 1970, he said that we had entered the age of computers and miniaturization. He added that we’d make no further advances until we learned to store knowledge in a non-linear fashion.
Shades of H.G. Wells and “The Time Machine‘...
Those golden rings, spun round by Rod Sterling among the comely and fair Eloi come to mind.
However bright we think we may be, everything we refer to for knowledge in our present scientific world - however quantified, and no matter the paradigm - depends upon a strand of flowing information, even on a compact disc laid out in points upon a line.
Just this evening my computer told me that a ’strand is broken’ and I haven’t the slightest idea what sliver of miss-stored data it refers to.
For that matter, thanks to “advances in technology,” my own computer while online takes me to sites to search for ‘how to’ answers.
“Was this helpful?” I am asked repeatedly.
“No,” I reply.
“Why?”
I respond by checking “Too little information” or a similar box, and adding an angry epithet to let the mysterious strangers on the other end know that I got lost in the morass of minutiae and don’t like artificially-manufactured scenery that I cannot see for all the Aspen trees of intertwined technological roots.
I’ve been around, my friends. This is not my first tour of duty, or my debut at life’s rodeo.
I’ve taken the whole course - learning to take computers apart and put them back together again.
Hell, I’ve even gone to the length of registering myself as a “Microsoft Partner,” hoping that some perk or opportunity would come my way to offer an advantage in this techno-game. But as yet no such ready practical opportunity has presented it without travel or great cost.
My nephew and godson, Michael, is a LAN specialist for a big firm in Hollywood entertainment and media duplication. He taught me well never to bend a prong or use a magnetized screwdriver when working on the body of our miniaturized, robotic and self-aware metallic and plastic counterparts.
Still, I managed, from my own ineptitude, to fry at least two motherboards, and probably render useless and irretrievable any information on a couple of hard drives.
Hard drives, and hard times.
They seem right now to go together hand in hand.
Our economy has me running scared, as I attempt to catch up with it by tracking my dollar footsteps online from one account to another.
Accounts online. Ay, there lies the most dastardly rub!
You need a Monty Python trickily designed password to get into them, of course - without the attendant humor.
It’s far worse than responding “blue, yellow,” or “green.”
What the hell was that password?
Ah well, maybe I didn’t spell the answer correctly as to who or what was my ancestor’s or favorite pet’s name.
I may calculate and carefully lay out my questions and answers -as well as clues - in Romance tongues, but usually can’t recall what part of the inevitable power-prone, personal God complex I used in my answers and clues.
Did I capitalize it? Was it all in small case?
Whatever the case, I doubt my ancestors - mostly stalwart and stubborn Sicilians and southern Italians from tribes like the Samnites (last conquered by the Romans in the Abruzzi regions of the ‘boot‘) - would let anyone get away with all the invasive liberties that a mere machine and its makers are taking with me and you.So, where’s the remedy?
Instead of mother’s milk and chicken soup, we’re treated to a recipe of service packs and constant updates - whether automatic or planned.
In fact, I have yet to find out just how to properly set up a back-up file for regular safety for my system.
Why?
Every “path” I enter to whatever device or drive or online site seems to contain ‘fatal errors.’
Last time I heard that phrase was in telemarketing - whereupon I countered someone says “Fatal.”
“Fatal?“ asked I - well, who the hell died? Last I checked the customer, client, and I too were a ll just fine. It wasn’t brain or heart surgery - and, as far as I could tell, not rocket science resulting in the death of a whole planet!
Even then I was dealing with computers, telephony, and the human condition, from the time New Englanders were going to bed and Hawaiians were just getting rolling.
And my accent shifted as needed…
I, of course, ever the actor, true to two collegiate degrees in theater and ever the entertainer, varied my style to suit Avon or American Express, or Amoco, and any geographical jargon I encountered.
My life experience and education served me well except for the current economy with its fell curses, and a whole world of trade taking place in encoded terms upon a stream of data while markets and interest rates fluctuate.
It prepared me for selling a credit card to an entrepreneurial lady in Malibu who invented the bar code, and somewhat lasciviously invited me to come stay with her - although I demurred. And it helped that I knew rudimentary Italian when an old guy in New Jersey took the phone from his ‘good fellas’ to say: “You ask-ah the questions in Italian, and maybe I take-ah the card.”
I did. And he did.
Every bit of this life since the advent of IBM and Apple, it seems I spent in foraging through communications aided or impeded by computers.
I knew at the outset, that I had to accommodate the technology or be consigned to a wasteland of ineptitude that T. S. Elliot never even imagined.
To do otherwise would have meant I consented to extinction as an intellectual Dinosaur in my own developing time.
And that wouldn’t do.
So now here, like you, am I.
I’ve downloaded until I’ve found myself down hearted in the extreme.
You know how it goes.
You look for the answer within the system, but find you have to tread where angels fear to go: into the Ethernet - out upon the web, the branch when stepping out upon you know hangs over an abyss where hardly anyone has yet climbed out upon.
Hey, we‘re all Captain Qwirk here.
All screwed around by some errant microchips and a horrible lack of Dilithium crystals to power the Starship Intercourse.
I can’t take credit for that last turn of phrase.
An old friend -long gone but not forgotten - slid that sliver of fine satiric, Jonathan Swift-ian language my way.
Oh, my friends, we’ve all got questions, without any definitive answers within sight.
I’ve heard that an answer is on the way: a new 7.0 operating system that picks up the strands of Vista and finally ties them together into a sensible knot.
It might as well be Gordian, and impossible to unravel.
This twisted twine, however, winds its way round subjects like geo-global environment and economies, depressions, socialism, free trade, fair trade, recession, environment, education, Democrat and Republican politics, democracy, republics, communism, religion, ethics, states, cities, unemployment, infrastructure, and most importantly personal ethics and salvation itself by whatever means in this world of ours and beyond.
I’m not sure if I’m Jason, heading the Argo-computer-nauts, or Odysseus adrift amidst ancient wars in the Mediterranean, or just god old Spock on a bad day - thoroughly compromised by emotions in a ‘brave new world’ of reason and technology.
It seems altogether too random for Spock. He could not possibly imagine such a happenstance and even ruthlessly cruel game of chance - and especially one in which there was no clear winner.
It does not compute.
But then, he couldn’t have conceived of us as we now exist , in this time in which we seemingly aimlessly circle the sun within a starship of clay round old Sol apparently out of control.
It’s far too gamey for Leonard Nimoy, in any case…
Will we, if we reach out, hit the mark?
Oh hell, aim the laser at the enemy vessel, Scotty, and remember, we’ve got planet Earth in a tractor beam at the same time!
What’s that?
What do you mean - you “can’t just beam us up?!”
Scotty boy, don’t you like playing this quaint, antiquated game like in the local churches?
They’re calling out the numbers now…
That’s just the way it’s done here on the home sod, my boy, when the folks gather and intone Saints Andrew, Blaine, and Dundee as you would have it!
So get used to the routine…Now, they call it “Bingo!”
Will it be “lucky 7” under the letter “I,” or be nixed by not hitting every corner on the card?
Maybe we can get it diagonally, or at least in a cross pattern. It’s pretty shaky, though, no matter which way you look at it.
“It’s an unacceptable alphabetical-numerical toss-up right now,” says Spock.
Oh, puh-lease, Spock, give us a break…After all, if we must be subjected to this crapp game of celestial chance, would you ever walk into this Bingo parlor without fixing the odds?
Hmmmm?!
I don’t think so.
Consider the odds.
It seems like perdition is just around the corner anyway we go…
It’s been predicted, and that’s the common perception becoming reality here.
So, now you gotta decide.
Hear the right number?
“Under the “B”…
So, who’s raising their hand to yell “Bingo!“ and claim the jackpot now?!
Charles writes many articles for Opednews on society, politics, arts, aned the economy. His writing is also found for the Pueblo Chieftain at: http:www.chieftain.com
