Me & Tubby PC

The TV ad for Macintosh characterizes the PC as a somewhat overweight but neat and prissy man. The Mac dude on the other hand is slim, young and contemporary.

I’m cool with the Mac guy, but I disagree with the PC portrayal. He should be a big, fat, whiney slob who is also a nag and a pack rat. He also is prone to hardening of the arteries.

I have always had Macs at the office and at home. A year or so ago, Kathie and I purchased a Dell PC laptop thinking that this was the way the world was going. As usual, the world is going the wrong way.

I hate the damn thing. My Mac was just like the guy in the ads. He was cool and laid back and just let me do my work. Tubby PC is always yapping at me about something: “you must get this update NOW!”

He also has his own agenda. My favorite is when he announces that something that he has just done, totally without my permission, has been completed and the computer will shut down in 2 minutes. Hello, I’m still working here!

He’s fat because he eats too many cookies. This apparently has had a very negative impact on his circulatory system. He has slowed down now to a speed that even the designers of the original Univac couldn’t bear. When you ask him to do something, you can hear his little gears grinding away as he struggles to get it done. He’s like an obese guy trying to mow his grass with a push mower. You can practically hear him huff and puff.

Sometimes like me when I am standing in front of the refrigerator trying to remember why I am there, he forgets what he is doing and nothing happens. Then I have to reclick the icon to remind him and start the huffing and puffing all over again.

He also has a sarcastic sense of humor. The little hour glass he displays on the screen while he slowly labors is a constant reminder of my life slipping away.

I asked my brother-in-law who was a systems analyst before he retired and is still into computers why it behaves like this. He explained that it picks up all sorts of extraneous stuff, i.e. cookies from the internet that slow it down over the course of time. His fix for this is to buy a new computer.

My fix is to swear at Tubby PC and to weigh my chances of reaching the neighbors pool if I hurl him like a discus.

This didn’t happen with my Mac. Apparently the nefarious sorts who produce cookies, viruses, worms, etc. can’t be bothered with Macs because there are too few of them. That’s fine with me. Let them keep picking on the fat kid.

I will buy a new Mac laptop at the earliest possible moment, i.e. when I have the money.
Of course, I will have to go to the store to do it. It would be asking too much of Tubby for me to try to order it over the internet.