Technology is against me.
I have a certain kind of superpower. It’s not enough of a decent ability to make me eligible for either the Justice League of America, or the X-Men / Avengers, but it’s something that, I think, makes me stronger and better and smarter than the average bear.
Everyone has these minor superpowers. I have a friend whose special ability was always being able to find parking spaces at all times, even during rush hour. It would be Sunday noon, hot outside, shopping malls packed with people seeking airconditioning, ridiculous traffic, and he’d still be able to find an empty parking slot within minutes.
“God,” He said. “You gave me this power….. is that all?”
Another friend, until recently, had the ability to make it rain simply by putting a skirt on. Her boyfriend, who is originally from Canada, brings horridly strong storms and typhoons with him every time he flies back to Manila. Typhoons Milenyo and Ketsana / Ondoy were some of his works.
One of mine (and I have a lot – my fingernails regenerate three times as fast as anyone else’s and sometimes simulate the same constitution as adamantium, my sometimes eidetic memory that nowadays only seem to work with teenybop song lyrics and Bible passages, and let’s not forget my innate ability to hurt people’s feelings) is the ability to keep track of five different trains of thought and work on them simultaneously. This is like a budget computer with pre-programmed functions which, when you think about it, makes me better than the iPad. This could be the supposed Gemini personality, or an additional incentive to enjoy the one thousand and one hobbies I seem to have, but I can do about seven different things all at the same time. I write, I check mail, I crochet, I make pendants, I’m nifty with chase hammers, I do web design, I paint (traditionally and digitally), and I have done all these at some point in time while riding on a bus, and have done at least three all at once during the rides. Unfortunately, the multitasking capability has to involve the computer in some part. Which brings me to my kryptonite.
Everyone has their kryptonite, too. I have a lot of kryptonites – my inability to wear high heels (my surly temper increases exponentially according to the angle of my foot against solid ground, and doubles considerably on rocky terrain), my fear of roaches (although this also becomes a superpower in some way, because I seem to run twice as fast, punch people twice as hard, and am able to shatter the eardrums of everyone in the vicinity) – I can go on and on. But the most obvious one is technology’s aversion to me. Technology hates me. This is odd for someone who first started out deciding she wanted IT for a degree, but yes. Possibly this could be a genetic mutant trait, as one of my sister’s super-abilities seem to include being able to destroy or misplace technology (games, boombox, laptops, etc.). Once, several years ago, I absolutely believed she was able to cause my Sega game console to stop working just by looking at it. Mine is widely different from hers, because these work when anyone else is using it. It’s only when I’m using it that it chooses not to.
My desktop PC has hated me almost from the day I got it. It automatically boots back up five minutes after I’d shut it down. The cooling fan particularly despises me, and chooses to commit suicide rather than work properly. My graphics card barely works with Plants versus Zombies. My flatscreen monitor started spewing green Matrixesque lines and squiggles three days after I bought it. At the first signs of sunlight my whole system immediately shuts down – which means it barely functions during the summer months which, in the Philippines, means about half a year.
It’s not always limited to computers, either. Television sets / flatscreens in my possession seem to have an incongruous way of working again as soon as I’d given it away to someone else. Personal electric fans I’d thought have broken down sputter back to life under someone else’s ownership without repairs, mostly the miniature variety.
Technology loves my boyfriend though, even when he claims to hate it. My boyfriend is that type of lovable geek who doesn’t need to study to ace a math or programming test, and had been fixing hardware since his early teens. He’s not a big fan of programming, and is more of a tech writer than anything else, though he would succumb to freelance web projects if the money’s good.
My desktop loves him. His walking into the room is all it needs to suddenly and properly function. It purrs like a little kitten when he starts it up. Nothing breaks down in his presence. The instant he walks back out though, it reverts back to bitch mode (Windows users probably know what this means).
My laptop works in conjunction with my desktop pc. When I switch to the former as an alternative, it responds by crashing Firefox successively. When I switch to Lunascape, the whole laptop, shocked by my audacity, responded by shutting down for no reason other than that it thought I was doing something important.
Case in point: the desktop pc shuts down five minutes after I try to start it up. This happens ten, twelve times. He walks into the room and gives it a try, and it works for the whole day. He’s not doing anything that I haven’t been doing, save that it’s his finger doing the button-pushing, and not mine.
My boyfriend has technopathy. He becomes One with the motherboard.
Shortly after my boyfriend leaves, I shut the computer down. Two minutes later, as I am getting ready to leave, it boots up again. Puzzled, I shut it back down. It responded by restarting. This happened about five more times, before I gave up and pulled the plug.
There is really nothing much to this post, save that my desktop hasn’t been working again after trying to start it for the umpteenth time, the same desktop that has some files I need for later in the day, and my boyfriend isn’t here for it to flirt with. So, two possible reasons: desktop technology must really, really, REALLY hate me….
…or there’s an invisible leprechaun living inside the computer.
