The Best Offense

I.B.: Well, I’ve finished everything I wanted to talk about, so I’ll let you out early today. But before I do, a couple of things.

Don’t ever tell a class you’ll let them out early, then hold them for another ten minutes. Especially right before Thanksgiving break.

***

Too much defense is a bad thing. I purchased Norton Antivirus from the school to replace outdated McAfee Antivirus. McAfee shipped with the laptop, and required me to pay for updates on a regular basis. Norton from the school has a longer update period. The choice was clear. Figuring that too much defense couldn’t hurt, I decided to install Norton, then uninstall McAfee. After all, if one antivirus program protects my computer, two must do twice as much. Turns out that two running in conjunction crashed my computer every time it booted up.

For forty-five minutes in the law school’s library I futzed with the settings on this old laptop, unable to deactivate the system beeps that punctuated the library’s still like an epileptic seamstress watching a strobelight. There is no “Safe Mode” option immediately available at the boot screen; you have to enter the setup menu before safe mode becomes available. In addition, you have to yank the battery from the laptop while it’s frozen in order to make safe mode available. Funner video games I’ve enjoyed than this one. It reminded me of Sphere by Michael Crichton.

/SPOILER ALERT.

When the protagonists discussed the very nature of the titular sphere, after having all experienced it, one compared their situation to that of a cockroach or other tiny insect within a space probe, or similar electronic device. Though it may have seemed to the cockroach that the device, filled with danger and peril and electricity at every turn, constituted an intelligence test, to the inventors, the probe collected data from deep space. Similarly, the humans were ill-equipped to comprehend the sphere’s true purpose. This rectangular laptop is my sphere, though I gained a swelling sense of frustration, not a near-Godlike omnipotence.

/END SPOILER ALERT.

Though computers lack intelligence, pundits frequently ascribe that quality with the cliché: “Computers are only as smart as their users.” For all its broad capability, your average computer is no less and no more basic tool than a hammer. When I was cursing the computer in the library, whispered expletives brushing past my lips, it was really my own incompetence and ignorance that deserved the harsh words.

Here I stand ‘pon a precarious precipice, a precipice that separates the computer lover from the cyber-Luddite. I represent a rare breed, the in-betweener. You are either comfortable with computers or you think them more arcane and incomprehensible than the newest Medicare Prescription Drug Discount Program. (Incidentally, in helping my over seventy years of age father fill out the various forms, it stuns me how Medicare expects the elderly to subscribe when I have to sit and study the scant sheets for upwards of forty minutes just to begin to have an inkling of what it is all about.) As we age and supplant those without knowledge of computers, and raise our children computer-literate, those that fear computers will be limited to the third world and the Amish. Even then, pop culture, increased charitable opportunities and Rumspringa will expose them to computers. Until then, a precious few children of the sun shall use computers yet not understand what and why they are.

Do not misunderstand me (on this issue. Feel free to misunderstand me on everything else, as is your wont.). I appreciate the convenience computing offers. However, if I had my druthers, I’d be working with mechanical typewriters and helper monkeys, and pigeons would carry my missives to and fro, rather than electrical impulses. Computers have so interlaced into our society that we cannot extricate ourselves without disconnecting from society altogether. Sure, people live off of the grid, but what does that constitute but that old simp, or that old simp’s son, off in the woods, coming into town every few weeks for supplies. The exception rather than the rule. Even now, typing this entry in, backspacing away the myriad mistakes my fat fingers visit upon this virtual paper, the hypocrisy settles in my lap like a sleepy cat.

I need this laptop. I need Prism. Though devoid of emotion, intelligence, depth, anything that signifies humanity, Prism has become as much a part of my life as anything else. Indeed, much like a security blanket, I’ve started to form, heaven forfend, an attachment to this machine. Indeed, as much as it allows me to transcribe the professor’s notes in class, it also serves as a shield to hide me from professor’s eyes. I find myself hiding behind it sometimes as a toddler escapes behind her father’s leg. Too much defense is a bad thing.