It has been two weeks now since my faithful but alien laptop was linked to the Mother Ship. I nurse it along, hoping that it can just make it a few more days. I have lots of work to finish, and I cannot afford to lose this little beast now.
I am alone here in the desert, and there is no hope of finding any kind of service for this faithful, but dying alien friend of mine. PCs are such weird devices anyway, and so alien compared to my always reliable Macintosh.
Yeah, my company requires us to use these PC laptops, running Windows 2000 and all the Microsoft Office applications. If you have been following my column, you know we have been working for a great company for nearly a year now down in San Diego. My work ethic is as good as any of my workmates, for we are always expanding our company’s bottom line, shoring up its product reliability, and forever hopeful of some sort of quality control that works.
My laptop, a Dell mid-level charcoal gray unit, is hooked to the Mother Ship at least three days a week down there in foggyville-by-the-bay. San Diego back in the Seventies was kind of nice. Now all the communities that were around back then are gone to seed.
A while back, my boss allowed me to work from home here in the Mojave four days a week. This was great. I got a cable modem, an E-Links cable router for all my computers, and a VPN account to access the server down at work.
I have worked this way for a few months now, and had no trouble at all with my laptop. When I am at work in San Diego, my computer is hooked directly into the Server Net. And it is also linked to Tech Support. Tech Support is vital to a PC. There are daily, and even hourly Virus Inoculations. There are also continual software updates and patches. The best part of all is that there is a large contingent of Microsoft Technicians there, who tirelessly repair and restore our computers, keeping them operable.
Under such conditions our PCs and laptops are operable, and even productive. We can actually get work done on them, which is remarkable to me. The standing Joke in the company is that when we finish building our Product for the Government, there will be one company technician for every government employee using a PC. I know it sounds like a joke, but it may not be far from the truth.
So why is my trusty PC laptop dying now? Christmas and New Years. My boss said work from home for those two weeks. Lay back. Relax. Just get your 70 hours of work in, but do it from home. (I love this job!)
I have been trying to get all of our employees to work from home. I told Management to think about it for a moment. Here we are building a network for far-flung government agencies and offices, so they can always be connected and in touch with one another. If we are doing that, why can’t we work far-flung from the office too? We have the means, and it is a great way to test our product, right?
They agreed, in part. So I work from home, in part – now four days a week from home instead of five days a week down there. My family is much happier, and so am I.
But now my little alien laptop is dying, adrift from the Mother Ship, and I see that it will not be possible for me to work from home exclusively. Oh, I can be on line, and busy doing my work from home. That is no problem. It is my PC. It cannot live apart from a periodic connection to the Server, and especially apart from Tech Support.
I started having problems with it going into my second week at home. No virus protection updates. No Server updates. No Application updates or Microsoft Technician hand-holding for my laptop.
It is dying. I can see it going. If it could talk, it would be sounding like HAL, as Bowman was pulling out memory modules. “Daisy . . . Daisy . . .”
This is a remarkable thing to watch!
It is as if I am trying to nurse an alien life form, and hoping for some way to keep it from dying, until I can once again plug it into that Server, that Mother Ship, so it can be revived.
What does this all mean?
It means that there are hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting people out there, buying PCs running the Windows OS, who will never have a Mother Ship to plug into.
Without that, it is just a matter of days or weeks before their little alien PC dies the “Blue Screen Of Death.” They will likely lose all their data, but that will teach them to back up their stuff. They will also have to wipe the Hard Drive and reinstall everything once more. (Suckers! And they thought Macs were too expensive! A Mac would never cost them all that wasted time and money!)
It means something else too. Microsoft is pushing Windows XP and the future iterations of its OS as being much more reliable.
Sure, they are more reliable. Those PCs running the new Windows XP are periodically plugging themselves into their Mother Ship over the Internet, while their “owners” are asleep or out of the house.
I understand it perfectly.
A PC today, left too long apart from the Microsoft Mother Ship, will die.
Shhhh! Now don’t tell anyone. Especially don’t tell anyone at Microsoft what I said. I think they do not want us to think about the Mother Ship too much. Such knowledge, if it got to be public, would not bode well for Microsoft. Who would want to own a computer that is that dependent on its creator? Who would want to trust one that had to be given updates and patches on a daily basis? This is exactly what the new Windows OS means, but nobody knows . . .
Boy, I am glad I have a Mac to work on, after the day is over! There are problems I never have to think about or worry over when I use a Mac.
After all, Macintoshes have no need to get periodic fixes from Apple, right? Our trusty little iMacs and iBooks can stand on their own.
Macs always have, haven’t they? No Mother Ship for them. My respect for the Mac, and for Apple has grown since I started working on a PC.
Now, if my laptop can only make it past New Years, until next Wednesday! . . .
Pray for me, working on the Dark Side. Pray for all the poor souls out there, nursing their creaky, weak and dying desktop and laptop PCs, all alone in an alien world, adrift from their Mother Ship!
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.