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I hate computers…and five other minirants

I hate computers…and five other minirants

1.) I hate computers. Since humans discovered that the entirety of human knowledge, actions, and activities can be reduced to ones and zeros, humans have become grumpier and more stupid. And the more we rely on computers, the more complicated they become. Take today for instance, when I had to spend three hours on the campus waiting for computers to come back online. Nevermind that they *never did* and my problem was *still* taken care of (then why did I have to wait in the first place?), the computers were just down so the entire staff of a 9,000 student college were reduced to dopey-voiced, chainsmoking droolers.

2.) And while I’m on computers, what brilliant morningstar of a computer engineer decided it was a good idea to incorporate a WEB BROWSER in the system kernel? Today, as I’m trying to recouperate from three hours in Land of the Living Morons (see above), I attempted to access the university servers–which, because of a combined over-dependence on ASP mixed with some pretty bad Java, a heap of PERL and piss-poor CGI, locked up IE (remember, part of the XP Kernel??) and forced a reboot–which crashed windows. Now, some Einstein of a dumbass at Microsoft decided to make NTFS the default (and honestly, much better) file management system in WinXP. However, the boot disks (a.k.a. Emergency Recovery Disks) are in FAT (the old version). Translation? There is no feasible way to get your documents off the system once it crashes. I lost two essays and missed a deadline because of it.

3.) Children should be shot. All of them. I used to love children, but now I hate them. They whine, they complain, the are demanding and they smell. YES children smell! You know what I’m talking about–that eight-year-old stench of “I’ve-been outside-in-the-sweltering-heat-and-don’t-know-what-a-bath-is-and-lack-the-neurons-to-realize-that-playing-in-mud-only exacerbates-my-budding-BO”. So here you have this smelly, dirty, mini-adult screaming about how he or she doesn’t want to take a bath and you, the adult, attempting to explain in Kiddy-English just why what THEY want is irrelevant.

4.) Parents should be tortured and then shot. All of them. For what they did to their children and are continuing to do by drawing air into their lungs. Parents (and I am one), seem to have this warped perception that once children reach the age of majority, their role as guides and mentors is through and is, instead, replaced by their role as obstacle and tormentor. So all parents deserve unmitigated pain. 🙂 (Again, though, that’s what children are for. See above.)

5.) I hate summer. I hate Fall. I like spring–or at least the middle two months of it, when it isn’t still winter-cold and isn’t quite summer-hot. It’s summer hot right now and the AC runs constantly–when there is electricity. (We had a blackout here last night.)

6.) And last, but not least, why is it that everything that could possibly go wrong does just that at the same time? Is Fate really that cruel? Why, in the grand scheme of the evolutionary experience, haven’t humans developed the biological mechanisms necessary to at least schedule the bad things over periods of time? If someone you know dies, it’s two weeks before your kids can be bad. If your car breaks down, it can’t share the day with your wife leaving or your computer crashing.

Makes sense to me. I now see why people become grumpy when they get old and will never, ever again be angry at my dear old grandmother.