The Great Satan In My Computer

I recently complained to my only literate cousin J.W. that I hadn’t been hearing from him recently. He’s one of the people I hear from most often by email, so it’s more conspicuous with him than if someone else slacks off on their email. He in turn started kidding me about being too wrapped up in my web sites to have good sense. He accused me of not answering the questions he’d asked in the Several emails he had in fact sent lately! I had to do an “oops” on a dime. Oh. What’s this?

The problem wasn’t just a simple case of one of us having to retrain or restrain a sloppy cousin—no, no, it was far worse. It became quickly, frighteningly, clear that one or both of us would be butting heads with computer systems or email systems or a Call-Jesus-To-Turn-Me-Over, I’m-Cooked system! Damn, damn, damn, will nothing in this vast world of computers and computer programs ever just Work and not be folding, crashing, collapsing, burning out, curling up and playing dead like a pill bug, or just crapping in its invisible pants?!

J.W. pays plenty for his MSN email connection, so he went at it first. He even got to talk to a Person! I couldn’t believe it. As a non-paying customer of Yahoo (thank you for the freebee, Oh Lord, and you, too, Massa Yahoo!) I am not even able to find an Email Address I can use to address one of the Biggest Email Companies in the world. Maybe I’m really stupid and they have one I just can’t find. But that’s almost as good as not having one—they get the credit for having the address, then don’t have to listen to anyone too dumb to ferret out the address! Anyway, J.W. talked to a real person, a polite person, but still got no answer to our problem. They told him he checked out okay.

So I went back to Yahoo, and searched the help files. I found something that said “Contact Us”. In most of the known universe and all across the Internet, that would have meant “This way to an email address”, but that isn’t what Yahoo meant. It just led to more help files. One was a computer program that could ostensibly answer your questions, but I’d already gone that route with the robot days earlier. Computers like that always answer somebody’s question, just not YOUR question. I was thrown back on my own resources. Like a man putting his kid’s bicycle together at the last minute on Christmas Eve, I not only finally had to Read The Instructions, I had to READ ALL THE INSTRUCTIONS! It’s a horrible thing, a thing to be avoided at all costs, but I did it. Well, almost.

Right in the middle of this, friend Zandria mentioned the Bulk folder to me. I’d checked it once recently and found nothing except a single Spam email that belonged there. Then I’d dismissed it. But I decided, what was the use of a young college woman anyway if I didn’t employ her superior brainpower and astute observations, so I checked the Bulk folder again and there it was—my cousin’s most recent missing email! (Gaa! Pretend you just heard a stream of about 20 obscenities interspersed with whoops and I won’t have to spell them out.)

Good deal, this must be where the missing ones have been going. The problem was that I had long ago come to trust Yahoo completely and just “emptied” the Bulk mail without looking at the list. So now, never again can I be that blindly trusting. Yahoo was good to me for a long time, then it bit me.

“But, doctor, I DIDN’T know it was a snake when I picked it up!”

“Did you know it had something to do with computers?” the computer doctor asked.

“Sure,” I told him.

“Then you knew it was a snake. Next patient.”

Now back to the fine print in those instructions. It turns out you can not only mark something as SPAM—a thing I’ve only done once—but you can mark an email as NOT SPAM! Ah, hah! That perhaps is how I can solve this, but not quite yet. I had already angrily moved that misdirected email from my cousin out of Bulk and into the Inbox. Then I read the part about how it has to be IN the Bulk folder to be marked! One can move emails out, but CAN’T move them into the Bulk folder, so I can resolve nothing whatsoever until another one goes out of control and lands in that junk mail folder. Then hopefully, I’ll notice it and remember to mark it. I don’t even know for certain if I finally understand all this—I’m just guessing I do until I can try it. Like a pregnant cat, it can’t be Fixed until it comes back from wherever the hell it goes at night.

My telephone system either works or it doesn’t; I’ve never had to understand it to use it, and I like it that way, it’s a comfortable old friend. The computer can be such fun, but it’s more like having Satan for a friend—just when you’re having the most fun, your friend may turn toward you and do a head-spinning Linda Blair hurl. Oog, Satan, get thee hence!

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THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: There is no money in poetry, but then there is no poetry in money, either. -- Robert Graves

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