Burn, Baby, Burn

From a promising flourish of blogs regarding my dead cat, now another lengthy delay, so much so that my browser no longer even recognises my blog’s URL.

I am sat at my desk for the first time this year, my laptop whirring nosily (and, my boyfriend tells me, worryingly) as it exhales hot puffs of exhausted air onto my thankfully ventilated desktop. A near disastrous situation occurred over Christmas when, after already being told once that if I left my laptop on the bed it would catch fire, he then found it (after, in my defence, I had done some – in his eyes, lame – propping up of said laptop) nearly burning a hole to the centre of the Earth, for what purposes I didn’t ask.

No one else’s laptops do this, I have been informed. I guess its nice to feel special. Maybe I will forever be choosing suitable settings for the laptop, as with myself and well ventilated clothing so as not to produce unsightly sweat marks. I wonder if there is some sort of Mitchum equivalent for the technological world. Or, more effectively, I wish I knew what the problem was.

My boyfriend has uttered the words ‘blow it away’ more than once. This is all very well but while there is something incredibly satisfying about typing the words Format C: into the DOS command prompt, reminiscent of late 80’s and early 90’s movies (although sadly the type isn’t a dramatic, something-is-just-about-to-happen fluorescent green but a rather uninspiring off white) it never, with me, oh it is always with me, ever quite as simple as that.

When I started blogging, just under a year ago, my old computer was the subject of such frustrated flurries of text. I felt bad for it, I really did, but what could I do? It was either break down, again, into a pool of my own snot ridden tears, or write. I thought buying one of the most expensive laptops on the open market at the time would perhaps ensure that such incidences didn’t occur again.

Now, don’t get me wrong, Aces (for that is my inspired, but perhaps in hindsight ill thought out, naming of my laptop) is good to me. I am a terrible PC user. I have a hideous habit of multitasking to the point that I have no idea what I am doing or what I am hoping to achieve with an array of programs and browser windows open, scattered in disarray over my dual monitors. My laptop does well to keep up, switching its resources frantically as I tab between memory hungry applications. There are occasions when it does get a little confused and all the tabs at the bottom start flashing as if in alarm to force me to leave it be and go and make a cup of tea so that it can carry out a damage assessment and resume some sort of normality while it attempts to soothe its WebStress abused interior. There are other occasions when programs will terminate when I am doing something that isn’t particularly favourable, although I think that may be an issue to take up with Adobe rather than lay the blame with the trusty innards of my overworked and under appreciated laptop.

I have never genderised my PC. When I learnt French we were informed that Ordinateur could be either masculine or feminine and we had a lengthy debate, as best all 14 year olds can do, about which it should be. Females in my class naturally said male – stubborn, irrational, refusing to do what you tell it to even when you have given it explicit instructions, cannot multitask without having a hissy fit etc. Males said female for pretty much the same reasons.

Aces is without gender. I wonder if it is because of my high turnover of computers (I am typing this softly so it remains unaware of its fate) that I refuse to develop an emotional connection with them like I have with my car and my guitars. It hasn’t displayed any real gender traits to warrant being labelled as such though.

It is more, I guess, a stroppy teenager than of a specific gender. It takes an age to finally get motivated to display anything other than a vague ‘yes okay I’ve noted that you’ve turned the power button on’ message (something that my boyfriend has also voiced numerous concerns about, and to prove a point has in the past booted his up, run various tasks and shut it down, before mine has even thought about getting further than the ‘hang on so you want me to actually be productive’ stages of the boot process). And, as I have previously mentioned, it gets more than a little warm (although I’m not entirely sure how the latter is connected to being a stroppy teenager, unless said teenager is perhaps running a temperature at the time or, like its owner, is suffering from an unsightly overheating problem, a result of which it is all being channelled through a tiny series of the PC equivalent of sweat glands).

I shouldn’t complain. If I do, Aces might hear me and voluntarily offer itself up for a transfer next time I’m in London by way of a mugging. Or decide to be particularly susceptible to the next thunderstorm that’s coming our way. It is, by all accounts, a fantastic computer. But why, as I write, do I feel that perhaps I am writing that so nothing bad happens to it? Am I really so fickle? Do I really believe a PC with several more brain cells than I have managed to club together this morning to operate something in the way of a functioning WebStress would succumb to flattery, in the same way that its owner might?

I think I might just check the insurance documents. Just in case.