You’re as Young as Your PC

My computer has reached middle age.

I have a laptop computer issued to my from my employer, which is really a way to eliminate any possible excuse I have for not being able to go to work. No matter how sick I might be, no matter that I might have the next pandemic gestating in my lungs, I can still get on through the internet and work. I blame Bill Gates, but that's by default.

A programmer's computer is like a mechanic's truck, it gets no maintenance and little in the way of attention, but it does get the damage so that I may spare such burdens to others. When you create a program from scratch, there are bound to be errors, omissions, "memory leaks" and typos. These are minimized by trying to make the system crash on your own PC before they're released into the world.

Thus the programmer's PC is the ground-zero for all the bad programming and lazy short cuts that blow up and create waves of electronic shrapnel. A programmer's PC doesn't last as long as most.

Apparently, only programmers know this axiom. The infrastructure people have a list of purchase dates and aging graphs that make an actuary table look like a child's crayon wanderings. All machines will be replaced IN ORDER and ONLY when their number has come up on the now-your-computer-is-dead list.

In the meantime, my laptop can no longer run as fast as it once could, it can't process as fast, and it's memory is cluttered with useless bits of trivia from so long ago, there is no way to know where the data originated.

It's battered, weathered, and the case has more creases and dings and scratches than ever before, yet according to the hallowed halls of administration, it's nowhere near early enough to retire. It's starting to sound a wee bit familiar.

But, as cluncky and slow as it may be, and as long as it takes to get going in the mornings, there are some things I will say in its defense. There are applications on there that took literally days to load, and even if I reloaded them on a new PC, they wouldn't have the history where I can simply select a project I'd worked on four years ago from the list of experience. It still runs the newest programs and the latest operating systems, and if it can't quite handle the newest version of Windows, well, from what I've seen, neither can I.

The dings and dents and scratches, yes give it character, but more importantly they identify the machine as mine more than any label could. Every mar on its surface was hard-won and placed there by me over the years. There are scratches that are the souvenirs and memorabilia of many business trips, there are dings and dents from a working vacation I took to Dallas when my step-father got a heart transplant.

The screen is as crisp and unblemished as the day I got it, though there are some spots that I cannot seem to clean off no matter how hard I try. One of the spots looks like a comma and I have incorrectly corrected may a grammatical error when a word landed on that spot.

It would be nice to have the big monitor, the dual processor, the memory so big and glorious that even the computer can't tell how much it has, but I'm really not ready to give up this one yet.

It may be middle aged, but so am I, and I still work every day.

Of course, there is the matter of the clogged processes, but I blame Bill Gates and everything falls into place from there.