As a Republican Southern Baptist from Alabama who spent the better part of her undergraduate Sundays at Mass, doesn't care about her friends' orientations, wants to see women in the pulpit, and has a fairly strong conviction that the world is, in fact, more than 6,000 years old, I've been associated with various evil empires for most of my life. This week, it pays off.
Along with the preceding, I'm also a bred PC user. I grew up with an IBM my parents bought from the Spiegel catalogue, a computer with 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 drives but no CD reader, a sweet little machine running on an 386 processor with glorious Windows 3.1. My mother instructed me never to push the Delete key, as she was afraid I might remove something important. Consequently, I got cozy with Backspace.
My school computers were even sadder than what I had at home - they had actual boot diskettes, and you could only access SimCity through DOS. We had a few Apples floating around, but I never used those but for Oregon Trail and Scarab of Ra. Now those were some good times.
Around sixth grade, after I complained that my friends were teasing me because we didn't have a color printer and my mother realized that this newfangled AOL 3.0 needed more space than the old computer could give, we got a spiffy new one with Windows 95 and the Aptiva software package. It even had a CD-ROM. I loved that thing, and then I got my first laptop, a Gateway Solo that weighed about 10 pounds, and forgot all about the PC. Since then, the family has upgraded and I've been through two more laptops (a giant Averatec and a much smaller Vaio), and I spent many of my college vacations troubleshooting issues with the family computer. I've done things in the registry no novice should be allowed to do, but everything still seems to be working, at least for the time being. (We do need to re-up our anti-spyware software, after all.)
Suffice it to say I've seen my share of frozen screens, error messages, and the Task Manager, but I can't help it - I love my Windows, and I love my PCs. Don't get me wrong, Apple's products are intuitive and shiny, but there's somehow less of a challenge when the icon jumps up and down, practically screaming, "Pick me, pick me, you moron! Click the button!" These Apple features have come in handy, however, as I've been forced to jump in and use them at work since my college internships.
And yet, beginning tomorrow, some of my department's Macs will be replaced by - gasp! - Dell desktop computers. The staff isn't too pleased to be losing their Macs, especially since almost no one is comfortable with PCs, but we're all going to PC training on Thursday to get us on the same page.
The Mac tech called me today to see which programs he'd have to transfer to my new computer. While I had him on the phone, I asked how useful the three-hour PC seminar would be, since I already know my way around XP. "You're going to be bored for quite a bit of it," he said. Good times.
Other than that, today was a mixed bag. I had a great impromptu lunch with a friend at Urban Standard, a relatively new cafe/coffeehouse on the north side that has the best grilled cheese sandwiches I've ever tasted (they come with balsamic dipping sauce), but then I had a mall pretzel for dinner. I found a copy of Live at The X Lounge III at What's on Second for $2, but I fell down a few stairs on my way to purchase it. I had to drive to Brahms practice in a monsoon, but I saw a fox running across the road when I was leaving work, and that made it all better.
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