In The Beginning ~~

I’m passing on this little crazy tidbit because of Beth.  She jogged my memory of my first PC and I knew if I didn’t write about that, I’d forget.

My first PC was 15 years ago, with Windows 95 to start, and back then it was almost $2000 for a bundled package.  I can’t even remember the brand except that it started with either a B or a G.  Watch it be neither.  I placed that order and was so excited I actually had chills.  I counted the days until it arrived and when that day came, oooooo boyyyyy, I felt like I was on top of the world.  I opened all the boxes and there were a lot.  I spread all the parts on the floor and got out the diagram and started putting it all together.  “Hey, not too hard”, I thought.  Then it was ready and I was all smiles.  For a moment I stood back and admired my handiwork and my new found extreme pleasure of knowing that I, too, was going to be a part of this great web of the world. With an excited deep breath, I sat down in my new office chair at my new desk and was completely all a’twitter.  Then it hit me. The smile turned upside down. I squinted. I felt a major panic hit me.  I had no idea how to turn it on and it didn’t say how to do that in the instructions.  Completely dumfounded, I sat there and tried to figure it out.  Nothing, not a clue.  So I picked up the phone and dialed the company and never felt more the fool when I said, “Hello, I know this is probably a silly call, but I just got this computer and it’s ready to go, except that I don’t know how to turn it on. Could you tell me how, please?”  The guy on the other end actually said to me, “Is this a joke? Did Bill put you up to this?”  And then he starts laughing and calls out to Bill.  I could hear them both, and guess who felt like a bigger fool than I did, HA.  So, he told me where that button was (in front of my nose, for heaven’s sake), I pushed it, and the lights came on!  Heaven!  Then, I started pushing keys and shouldn’t have done that. All these pop-ups (I didn’t even know what they were back then) showed on my screen and I started clicking on those, too. The next thing I knew, I had a trillion porn sites grabbing my entire existence!  If I thought I was in a panic before, well that was nothin’ compared to what was happening now. I couldn’t even breathe, I was heart attack bound, and I couldn’t get the darn stuff off my screen as it kept multiplying like crazy.  I dialed the company back.  Oh yeah, had to do it.  This person explained to me how to shut my darn PC off.  Oh, it just gets worse. It wouldn’t shut off by the regular avenue, so I had to push that button again.  The next thing I hear is the person asking me if I have an antivirus program.  A what?  Machines get sick?  Here I am, the first day with a computer, and within 10 minutes I find out that it is now infected with viruses and I have no antivirus program.  I unplugged everything and took the tower into a shop I found in the yellow pages (I still use the same company). At first I thought I’d have to take ALL the parts to them, but they explained it was the tower that is actually a computer.  Off I go and they fixed it by the next day, I brought it home, rehooked everything, and then took a breath and tried again.  THIS time, here’s what happened:

I knew there were great games online and I wanted to play pong, so I did a search, clicked on one of the results, and landed in this strange pong game site.  The game looked like a cave and there was a button that said click here if you want to play. I did. That ball started flying faster than I could even see!  I lost the game to a robot within 10 seconds. All of a sudden, I saw this typed message to me and it asked if I wanted to play. Omg, where am I.  I didn’t know how to answer so I thought (really I did) that someone must be looking at me at that very moment.  Out loud I said, “Sure!”  And then I sat and sat.  The message started again, and it said, “Do you want to play or not”.  Uh oh, talking out loud must not be the answer, so I frantically started looking for a way to communicate.  A message started again, and this time, it said, “I think you must be brand new to computers and don’t know what to do. Do you see the little area under the cave? Click into that line and type an answer, then we can talk”.  It was there! The space to type was there!  My fingers were flying. It turned out that this person was a girl named Kerrie in California and she taught me the game.  We batted that ball back and forth for hours and hours.  She won game after game that day, and at the end of every game she would type, GG.   I couldn’t figure out what that was.  Finally I won 1 game, and again she typed GG with an exclamation point behind it.  I was so thrilled that I won and so positive that she was good naturedly laughing about the whole thing, that I thought GG must mean “giggling”!  I typed GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG across the whole bloody screen.  Who knew it meant Good Game?  Can you even imagine later on when someone would type, “gg, p”.  I certainly had a lot to learn.  Oh, and if you’ve never played a team game online, “gg, p” means “good game, partner”.  It did NOT mean “good game and now you can take a break and go pee”.

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This is for Carole (Ramblingon) just because I thought it was cute of Sam and Lucy and Carole’s Miss Kitt has been so beautifully hatted:

                                            

And so, I am leaving you now to take a well deserved long nap.  I spent the entire night and today installing a gazillion batteries and setting up the front porch and the entire downstairs and half of the upstairs.  I am pooped.  GG all 

XOXOXO