New Computer, Old Miseries

My desk at home is a small one. Leprechaun tiny. Fact is, it's the same desk I've been using since junior high. I tend to hang onto things that way. It was only a year ago that the desk lamp I got the same time I got that desk finally died.

That was a sad day, especially when it came to figuring out where, exactly, I had plugged it in after first moving into the apartment.

Three months ago, the computer I'd been using?an ancient Mac SE?died as well. Well, the floppy drive did, so I was still able to transfer all my files to the even-more-ancient external hard drive I'd connected to it a while back. I'd written almost 15 years' worth of stories and four books (including the as-yet-unpublished one and the one that will never, ever be published) on that machine. It had served me well, not giving me a lick of trouble until now, when, in an instant, everything went pfft.

I knew the day would come eventually when I'd have to exchange that reliable old workhorse for something new, and so I'd set some money aside. Must say, though, I had no idea that the step into the supermodern age would be such a trying one. Not trying for me so much?I don't understand these things in the least, I just type on them?but trying for Morgan, who would be doing all the work while I sat off to the side, wringing my hands and smoking. I had full faith in her, though?she knows these machines like no one I've ever met. And for that (among other things), I am eternally grateful. Left on my own with this business, I would've been a man adrift, bumbling and useless. There would be much weeping.

But back to the desk.

My desk being as tiny as it is put certain physical constraints on the size of any new machine I might possibly consider. I'm not one of those people who can type with a keyboard in his lap?which is what one of those colorful cutesy-pie jobs would require. While machines may, indeed, be getting smaller, they aren't getting small enough. They certainly aren't as small as my delightful and beloved old SE was.

Fortunately, Morgan, who keeps up with these things, told me about The Cube. A magical, silver, 8-inch box it was, faster than thought, with enough memory to hold the stories of a dozen lifetimes. It sounded like the way to go. And maybe one of them flat screens, too, just to save a little more space. Leave plenty of room for the new high-powered lamp and the keyboard.

Which raised another issue. For some reason?modernist fashion sense I would presume?all the new keyboards being produced nowadays are black. I have no use for that. In the most literal sense, I simply cannot use black keyboards, because I can't see the fucking keys. So I was adamant about holding onto my old white keyboard. Granted, over the years most of the keys had been greased black, but I could clean that up?and still see the shadows that separate them (very important!).

Morgan, again fortunately, knew of a little doohickey that would allow me to continue to do that.

As we were discussing my options, I began to think that there was simply something wrong with the fact that writing stupid stories had become so subject to the whims of technology?but given circumstances, I guess I had no choice. I had to put my quasi-Luddite tendencies behind me, and accept the Mark of the Beast.

Other problems arose. You'd think, over time, that these things would get simpler to use. That's what all the science-fiction stories taught us, isn't it? Tell the jet pack where you're going, and it takes you there, that sort of thing. Well, they lied, those stories.

And I didn't realize how badly they lied until Morgan began explaining the difficulties involved in transferring files off a one-year-old hard drive onto a shiny new supermachine of the future. In fact, at first it seemed like it might not be possible at all?she'd brought one of those "Zip drives" over to my place a while back and hooked it up, but for some reason, it wouldn't acknowledge that decrepit old computer's existence. What I needed to do, it seems, was unhook the drive and bring it over to her place, where, she was certain, she could hook it up in such a way that it could be read?and not only read, but allow all those hundreds of stories to move to their spacious new home, this home of gleaming splendor, this mini-Mies van der Rohe that would be squatting on my tiny desk for the rest of my life.

Another problem?these new machines (working with the assumption that everybody is hooked up to that e-mail device) no longer come with floppy drives. Well, without one, and without the e-mail, I had no way to carry stories to and from the office, pass things along to my book editor, get them out of the apartment at all.

This was all getting insane. Fortunately, again, Morgan could take care of that.

I was beginning to sweat more at the whole prospect. If I had the ability to go back to scratching marks on papyrus with chunks of coal, by God, I would. Yet despite my sweat, one Saturday afternoon nearly three months after the old SE died (it takes me a while to work up the nerve to do things like this), Morgan brought a catalog over, pointed out exactly what I needed to ask for, circled the toll-free number and I picked up the phone.

Things like this seem so easy for some people. I had a friend comment offhandedly one day that his computer had broken, and that he was going to go get a new one that afternoon. He never said another word about it?just went ahead and did it and everything was fine. Damn him anyway.

Two days after I placed the order, the phone calls started. The credit-card company called, checking to make sure that someone hadn't stolen my credit card, using it to buy something silly. Then the Mac people called, to make sure that I had, indeed, intended to place this order, and wasn't "just drunk at the time or something." In the meantime, I unplugged the old machine and carried the hard drive over to Morgan's, to see what she might be able to salvage.

"If you can't get at that shit," I told her, "that's okay. I'll deal with it." And I could. I hadn't, of course, backed these stories up anyplace else, because I am an imbecile. I didn't like them that much, anyway. Later that evening, she got to work.

Her machine?a G3?wouldn't recognize the formatting of my little hard drive, so she had to come up with something else.

As luck would have it, between us, Morgan and I own a nearly complete history of the Macintosh product line. She pulled out an old IIci whose internal hard drive had died. She used a CD-ROM drive to get it started, hooked it to my little gray box, hooked my little gray box to a Zip drive, copied all the files to a disk, then had her G3 read everything off the disk. After The Cube arrived, she would hook it up to her G3, and I'd be in some sort of business again.

It amounted, in the end, to a high-tech game of Post Office, and when she first explained it all to me, I began to wonder what, exactly, was going to come out the other end?and whether or not it would bear any resemblance to the files I had written over the past decade and a half. I was fully expecting to start up The Cube and find all those files transformed into some sort of coded message from Satan. Or Morey Amsterdam. I kept my fingers crossed.

I stopped by Morgan's the day after everything showed up (it made more sense to have the machine delivered there, instead of my place). She already had things set up.

"It's like something out of Kubrick," she said, as I first began to comprehend what I was looking at. And she was dead-on. I had strolled into a futuristic wonderland, where everything's silver, everything's encased in Lucite and there are no sharp edges. It was quite beautiful, in a Colossus: The Forbin Project kind of way.

After the file transfer went much more smoothly than either one of us really expected it to, and after I discovered no otherworldly messages from Morey Amsterdam waiting for me, we went out and got drunk.

The next day, we hauled the contraption back to my place, where we ran into the final problem?that fucking desk. How to set up a sprawling futuristic wonderland on a tiny, 22-year-old fake wooden desk?

After some puzzleworks, it turned out to be entirely possible?just so long as there is nothing else whatsoever on the desktop?no papers, no photographs, no once-amusing knickknacks. Just machinery and wires. But that was okay. If that's what was necessary for me to go about my business here in the future, well, then, that's how it would have to be.

"What a glorious time to be alive," I rasped, after she plugged the last thing in, waved a finger over the top of The Cube (that's all you need to do!) and the flat screen glowed into life.

Then we went out and got drunk again.

The next morning, just over a week since I placed the order, and just over three months since the old SE died, I sat down cross-legged in my broken chair, waved my fingers lightly over The Cube and got down to work again.

This is where I ran into the final, ultimate disappointment.

Despite the mind-numbing advances made in home-computer technology, despite all the wonderful things I'd be able to do now that I'd never been able to do before, despite the ease with which I would be able to work, it only took a few minutes of poking around to realize that I was still looking at all the same tired, awful old stories I'd always been looking at.