My Love Affair With My Computer by Harvey Honsinger

Love affair with my computer? I'm calling it that, because it seems to be working out like all the love affairs I had before I met the long suffering, patient, intelligent, beautiful girl who too late discovered that she had believed all that I had told her. Enough of that.

Let me say that I am working on (with?) my third computer. Idiot box #1 was a "double floppy disk" model, with one disk telling the box what it wanted it to do and the other disk recording what the operator prayed he had told it to do correctly. The thing actually worked and made its typewriter-like printer set it down on paper, which came in a folded pile in a box with perforated holes on each side. I hated that damn thing, both in parts and in totality.

Then I got a new computer. My son was still home at the time, and he could make it do many wonderful things. If the weather was right, correct incantations said, and a multitude of keys struck in some cabalistic order, I could get it to turn on. Sometimes I could even get it to write and print an approximation of what I thought I had told it. It survived because of the big Number One Rule laid down by my dear, cautious wife. No weapons may be fired in the house unless human life is being threatened.

It was fickle. Just like a couple of my long lost loves. Ran hot and cold like a couple of others. It dished pleasure and pain at its personal whim, like another two or three females remaining nameless because of my personal creed of not speaking bad about the female species, having had two which were magnificent retrievers.

Now I sit before #3 having tried to figure how to get information off of a mini-floppy disk reader attached (successfully, by golly) which has on it a completed novel (hurray for our side) that cannot be transferred to my new 4 gigabyte usb stick-looking-thing which computer #3 tells me is plugged into the right hole (I always knew that 2-headed quarter would come in handy some day) and the stick is WORKING!!!. Working for who? (I know--for whom) How do I get the info to go on there? The disk being bigger than the stick, I cannot take the hammer and drive it in like a nail.

It's like girlfriend #13--tells me all is fine on the phone (let that read screen), but eyeball to eyeball is an ongoing lost cause. I never thought I could be as stupid about computers as I was about girls (and women).

I just checked. Dear wife is in the living room, so this infernal machine has survived for another day. Is there a sporting goods store close by that sells silencers for shotguns?

Harvey Honsinger, a 6th generation Texan, has six completed novels--westerns and historicals--and is actively marketing them. His short stories and poetry have been published in Arena Literary magazine. Harvey is an active member of the Thursday BWG critique group.