Computer Meltdown — Part Deux

Thursday morning.  I wake up at 10am — shower/ cook breakfast for myself (which consists of heating last night’s leftover pizza)/ edit my essay by reading it over for the hundredth time, one last time.  And might I add, patting myself on the back because it came out pretty well.

11am and I am ready to put this baby to the presses and press print.  I grab the printer from the living room to bring it into my bedroom — because as you recall my computer is hooked up to my TV — and I hook up the USB, plug the printer into the extended outlet, and I order my file to print.  I feel a smile form on my face.  I squeal in excitement.

I am looking at the tiny screen on the printer and I see nothing happening.  The only recognition of the print job is the mechanical noises coming from the machine — of things moving inside ready to prepare paper.

I click the icon of the cannon printer on my computer so I can cancel the printing.  I toggle over the print ordered at 11:02 and right click delete.  Now the color wheel is spinning and my computer is frozen.  I freak the freak out — and I lose it. 

I am screaming, wailing, and squeezing my nails into my skin to see an indentation.  I do not want to shut my computer down for fear that it will never start up again.  Water damage — so unpredictable!  I call my dad out of fury and helplessness — “What do I do!”  And he feels bad for me, so he matches my mood, but he suppresses the cursing that I am heavily using and is trying to tell me to calm down as I scream, “I swear I’m gonna do something crazy!”

What that something crazy is, I do not know or will ever, it just felt like the saying to say at the time.  But my father had the feeling that it involved me chucking the computer off our terrace. 

Or maybe 

Eventually I hang up on my father, because he can’t help me at his desk in Long Island, and he is not being as sympathetic as he would like to because he is at work and can’t join into my cursing frenzy.  Finally, out of frustration, I shut the computer off. 

It takes its sweet ass time in rebooting too — all the while, all through my hysteria —and when it finally does, my plan is to send the essay to myself via email immediately.

Once that is done I can reprint.

            Yet I notice, seconds after I reorder the print and the printer starts on its moaning again, that I had plugged the chord into the wrong USB port this whole time — so I tug it out and replug it into the port right next to that broken one.

            But now the printer does not recognize the confusion (which later I find out is just the printer not reading my computer, or vice versa) and instead gives me an ERRORx//:”\ warning.

            My blood boils inside my chest and I just keep roaring through my throat, louder and louder so that my Nona (grandma), who is next door, will hear me through the walls.  I swear I am screaming as if I was being tortured, raped and murdered, which just goes to show you what kind of neighborhood I live in, that no one came to my aid.  I mean, I am carrying on worse than my 5 year-old self in a TOYS “R” US.

            I spin in a semi-circle around my room, pointing from computer, to TV screen, to printer shouting, “Fuck you!  Fuck you!  Fuck you!”

            11:26 am and my Nona walks through the door to say to me her goodbyes and good lucks before I leave to give in the paper.

And she sees me crazy, mad eyed and drooling over the printer and computer with a turban towel tied around my head from when I took a shower earlier.

She steps in and steps out saying, “I’ll go get Kathleen” — our neighbor.

Kathleen comes in and tells me that I cannot cry over something I cannot control.

But that is the thing!  If it was something I could control I would be calm about my craziness — but I have no clue what to do and I cannot afford to stand here and do nothing about it.  But I can afford to go nuts — yes, that I can certainly spare 20 minutes doing.

11:30 — my uncle comes into the scene and we usher him out quickly, saying, “Go upstairs and be ready when we need you.”
            Kathleen says, “Maybe we can try printing it by me.”

And that is a wonderful solution.  “I sent it to myself!” I say; I knew there would be a reason that would come in handy.

Now next door, I sign into AOL, open the document — but I am given only one option — in notebook.  And that will not suffice.  The paper opens with @&**%#$// scrawled line for line with other cryptic symbols.  My heart stops pulsing.

“FUCK,” I hear myself say.

“Aw shit.  I forgot I don’t have Microsoft.”  Now Kathleen and I are trying to find a free Microsoft word to download when my Nona comes in with my home phone — and the caller is asking for me.

“It’s Kyle,” she says.

See, earlier, when I was on the phone with my father, I had called a tech support man who had helped me weeks prior when my computer screen first tapped out.  His name was Kyle, and here he was calling me back.

We spent a half hour on the phone, doing everything from memory reboots to resetting my printer settings on the computer  — deleting the printer from my computer’s system and reprogramming it. 

            Finally, 30 minutes later, 12:00pm, Kyle says to me as a wrap up to our conversation, “Well, it does seem like your computer is not recognizing your printer — whether that is because of the water damage or the wrong USB I cannot really inform you with an assertive opinion, being that the machines are not in front of me.  So in the mean time, try printing it over at your neighbor’s or even at your school and…”

            But that was all I needed to hear, so I stopped listening.  ARE YOU KIDDING ME! How could I have never thought of that before? Has logic completely failed me too?

            My next move: try to get Kyle off the phone so I can go and hand this fucking paper in already — but of course there are preliminaries.

            But then my hands are free, and the second I hang up I put on my shoes and leave — pajamas on, perfume sprayed spastically and sporadically, and no bra underneath my tie-dye shirt.  My uncle has already been informed to get the car.  And now I wait 15 minutes just for him to come get me from around the block.

           

Anyway, I am going to speed this part up a bit because it is boring, and all I did was go to school, find a computer lab, ask a bunch of stupid questions to the proctor, and print my paper — ranking in at 80 cents out of the 15 dollars that I did not use from my evaluation money that semester. 

            When I bring the damn paper into the English office, another professor of mine is working there (a different professor than the one this paper needs to get to), so I give him the paper to put in the other professor’s mailbox.

 I say to this professor, however, “Thank you for everything this semester,” and la dee da.

            And when I tell him that I have had a crazy kind of day, he seems to not believe me so I add, “I’ve already had a meltdown today.”

            And he says, “It’s not even 1 o’clock!”

            “Now you know,” I say.

           

And now you know too.  That the end result is — I hate technology!  The world was safer with typewriters in tow.