Computer's End: New Beginning

We see our hero entering the stage. He turns on his computer, and it takes forever to load. When it loads the computer is only a shadow of it's former glory. After being chewed by the antagonist: The Computer Virus, our hero's ally has a whole bunch of obstacles to overcome.

The hero: Charles tries his hardest to restore his computer to better days, but to no avail. There are a whole list of issues.

1. The Search Results tool has been munched on. "What do you want to search for?" Well actually that wasn't even up there. The only thing left was the search companion. If you have Windows XP, you know them as, Rover, Merlin, Courtney, and Earl. In my case I was stuck with Earl. Couldn't search for anything on my computer.
2. Windows Media Player was chomped on good. There was nothing left, but an error message and the Icon.
3. There were certain buttons on websites that couldn't be pressed (more on that later on in the post)
4. Norton Anti-Virus was a no show. Charles pressed that button a number of times, and like the famous Quote from Star Trek fame, "Resistance is Futile".
5. System Restore wouldn't work either, it would get half way done and then a pop-up would appear saying that it would not work. For some reason Charles would keep getting his hopes up during each attempt.

I'm curious, have any of you ever been on a hopeless or hapless quest? Where every turn you take leads you back to square one.

Case in point:

I tried to fix my computer without using my restore disk. Everywhere I turned lead to a brick wall. I tried to use the virtual technician for my Mcafee software that I recently bought, but I couldn't press the button on the web-page. Mcafee was too powerful for my computer anyways. My computer wasn't able to reload Norton Anti-Virus software either. Every time I would try, I get the same result, buttons that I couldn't press and the live update software loading itself 20 times or more. Heck, when I gave in and decided that I wasn't going to bother, I went and Checked AOL journals to see if anyone I read there had posted. I Checked Omar's AOL Journal, and not only couldn't I see any of the pictures he had on there, but I couldn't even pressed the button to open the comments on my screen. I had to go directly to the page of a particular post if I wanted to see or post comments.

So what do I do? I decide that I am going to "put my pet out of it's misery". Reluctantly, I walk upstairs to my bedroom, and get the "poison", that will be the conduit for the end of my computer's suffering. Remember the "Hapless" question I posed to above. Well I do, and let me tell you, I never felt so helpless, frustrated, and useless, in my entire life. It was if something or someone, bigger and badder had entered the stage. It was as if something or someone was there, waiting in the wings with a diabolical plan that was always three steps ahead of me. Why you ask??? I don't know if I ever posted an entry on my AOL blog about it, but a year after I got my computer it's DVD player fizzled out on me. When I went to get my restore disk, I saw this...



Check the bottom right corner. Yep, it's a restore DVD. Some computer's get Restore CD's. I just happened to get a DVD. What a tangled web, my invisible adversary weave. I wonder, if all of this was planned from day one. This may seem a bit like paranoia, but what if I tell you that I had an invisible ally on my side.

What are the odds someone (oh lets say me) going on vacation at the same time that my computer decides it's ready for Dr. Jack Kevorkian? What are the odds of me finding a DVD drive for my computer on sale for $39.99. Where is Data or Spock when you need them? Anyhow, I found one at best buy, and came home and installed it. It took me a little over an hour, but I managed to get it working, and I am now the proud owner of a mismatching pair of disk drives.

Finally I was able to bid farewell to my woes and the woes of my computer. I erased the virus, and unfortunately, I erased all of my blogging history. Pictures, journal entries, ideas, potential posts, poems, HTML code that I had saved, animated GIF's that Brandy, Donna, and another friend made for me, music that I downloaded from WalMart.com and that I got from a friend, and the pictures from my sister's baby shower. Fortunately for me, the latter is still saved in the memory card inside of my old digital camera. Memories wiped clean, because someone wanted to design something to destroy rather than create. My computer may be a machine, but it was filled with memories. Memories that I had to destroy as a precautionary measure, to ensure that they to wouldn't infect my computer again, when I re-installed Windows XP.

There is a quote from my favorite comic. "With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility". Whenever someone comes out with an great invention, there is always someone out there that finds a way to manipulate it, or turn it into a horrible monstrosity. They find the loophole and not give two shits about others feelings.

To the creator of the computer virus: If you are still around, and by some chance you are reading this, I hope your computer gets infected too. You deserve to know how it feels to be robbed of something special...Memories that fill ones Heart.