It's happened. Years I have been waiting for the Universe to reveal my superpowers to me and the day has finally come. Granted, its not exactly as I had imagined it (Ability to Turn World’s Oceans Into Giant Dairy Queen Peanut Butter Cups Blizzards), but buggers can’t be choosers. What's that? Oh, apparently its BEGGERS can’t be choosers. Well in my opinion I don’t think buggers should really be choosers either. Just saying.
Right. Back to my superpowers. So here it is: if something has an electronic component to it, any at all, I can break it. With my mind. I don’t need to touch it or anything. All I have to do is have an expectation for it to work and BAM, broken. Crazy, right? And how did I find this out? Well let me tell you THAT fun story.
So, you know when you’re in the middle of a skype video chat and everything is going along swimmingly and then your computer does this?
*&$*$&*&OWHLDGEWFTWER@*#)%&@#*
^&#%@&%$@^#%$@FHUHEF%^^GFE&W^FT#@
FH@*R^TCWUGF@&TR^DWVEFG@*^%#@$@
EFWLKI@#R*@#$^@(^(#^#@(^@RNKIRFHEGEFGK
And then promptly craps itself and goes blank?
And then when you restart it, it does the initial load thing with the Apple icon and the little circle thingy that goes round and round while it thinks about all the things a computer has to think about when booting up but this time it goes on and on and on for a long enough time that you think to yourself “well fuck, this looks like its going to be expensive…..”
And then you get a moment's relief when it stops doing that round and round thingy and goes to the blue screen right before a Mac usually loads the desktop but this time it just sort of stops at the blue screen and then goes no further as if saying "Ha! Sure psyched you out, huh?! Oh man, you should have seen that hopeful look on your face when you thought you’d fixed the problem by merely pressing the restart button! When are you Apple users going to learn this hilarious fact: MACS CRASH TOO. And in horrific and catastrophic ways! Good times, good times.”
Are you with me so far? We’ve all been here, right?
So now not only do I have a dead computer (that btw isn’t even mine so add some guilt to that intense computer rage) but a person on the other end of a skype video call wondering “hey, where the heck did she go? Hmmm. I wonder if I went too far with that dead hooker joke….maybe. But she laughed at the one about the midget in the washing machine so that doesn’t make any sense…..”
While that person spends the next 45 minutes questioning their choice of inappropriate humour, I am busily restarting this computer over and over again trying to bring it back from the brink by making deals with God. “Ok. I know I havn’t been to church in a while. Ok, ok, more than a while. And I didn’t pay taxes last year. Or the year before that. And I steal a lot of movies from piratebay.org. And cheese whiz ISN’T really a food group. And when I “borrowed” that blind guy’s cane to get to the front of the line for Road Trip: Beer Pong Lord of the Rings, I knew it was wrong. And I totally felt bad about it. Throughout the whole movie. Credits and all. Except for the singing hotdog part at the beginning. “Lets all go to the lob-by!” Ha ha. A singing hotdog! That always makes me happy. Maybe that made the blind guy happy too. Although I suppose he wouldn’t be able to tell that it’s a hotdog who’s singing. What was a blind guy doing at the movies anyways?! Maybe I don’t feel so bad after all.
Where was I going with this? Oh right. God. Yeah, so I was telling God that although maybe I’m not PERFECT, that I would try harder in the future if he would just use some of his God Juice and make lucky reboot number 27 the magic one. No such luck. I guess God ISN’T all-powerful after all. Or maybe he’s just stingy with his technology miracles. I have now accepted Steve Jobs as my Lord and personal savior.
Ok. So the computer is definitely broken in some way. Could be hardware. Could be software. Could be on its period. I don’t know about such things as computer science OR computer menstruation.
So in an attempt to let Skype Video Call Person X know that it wasn’t anything they did that ended the conversation so abruptly, I dug out an old PC (*shudder*) laptop and began the process of booting IT up. So of course I was there for another 20 minutes as it tried to update every frigging application under the sun (thank you Bill Gates for kicking my puppy while he's already down and sad about his other broken computer)
I then got to go through the fun song and dance of searching for microphone capabilities to see if continuing on in sykpe fashion was even possible. Of course you can’t just use your handy Mac-based application “Spotlight” to look for where that information might be. No. This is Microsoft we’re talking about. So that piece of information is stuffed in a stupid little yellow folder somewhere with a million other stupid little yellow folders that all look the same and have the word “system” in the title. And its not like you can open them all up and look because you’re computer is running so goddamn slow from its desperate updating and desire for you to renew your Norton Antivirus software. “Hey, you know what Norton? The chances of me getting a virus are pretty low becuase you're never going to stop loading long enough for my computer to connect to the goddamn internet!"
Then I clicked on a button.
And it made this noise: whiiiiiiirrrrrrrrrrr whooooooooosh whirrrrrry click click
At which point Skype Video Call Person X said (via gmail chat) “Hey, I have a crazy idea. Do you own one of those telephone contraptions? Let’s see if THAT works.”
And it did.
With some lovely static and feedback. BECAUSE OF MY FORMIDABLE SUPERPOWER THAT BRINGS ANY ELECTRONIC GADGET TO ITS KNEES, BEGGING FOR MERCY.
I have yet to see how this superpower can:
1.) be harnessed,
2.) be useful,
3.) not get me kicked out of every building I visit,
but I am very excited about the possibilities. Maybe I can go to a special school with a bunch of other freaky superpowery teenagers. And then Magneto will come and try and destroy me. But huzzah! I make his blackberry go all wonky, sending spam to his entire list of contacts. And then when he’s busy trying to write apology emails *WHAM* I spin-kick him in the throat. Awesome.
It feels really good to be blogging again. Contributing something noble and relevant to this world is really what it's all about people.
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