Dear Octopus,
My lovely old PC is sick. I awoke on Sunday to find that a virus - spawn of some sweaty, attic-based bounder with diagnosed anti-charisma and chronic halitosis - has infected my poor desktop Serena (named in 2005 after the equally lovely Serena Bishop, of Neighbours fame), rendering her start-up modules destitute and manual operations seemingly without hope. I turned her on and she bleats incoherently, mournfully, like Shadow trapped down a muddy hole at the end of Homeward Bound: The Incredibly Journey. It would be heart-breaking, if it weren't so utterly fucking infuriating that I've potentially lost all of my music and the only recent copy of my book.
Last night I naively sought to battle The Kraken attacking Serena's central nervous system, with weapons no more advanced than my iPhone and a few choice words of severe frustration. What could go wrong, I thought; I have a degree in literature (Woolf mostly, with smatterings of Flaubert), I know my dessert wines, and this is nothing more than a few tangled digi-knots in an electronic ball of string. How hard can it be?
The battle was bloody and brief. I'm ashamed to report that the early spoils of war belong solely to The Kraken, with this poor Squid little more than a bag of damaged pride, broken bones and partially ruptured organs. Everything came to naught. After the slaughter was complete I skulked downstairs to watch the scene in Entrapment where Catherine Zeta-Jones practices her aerobics among all those wires with bells on......by way of meagre consolation. Today at work I plaster my scars and suture the wounds, finding that no amount of smoked cigarettes nor vanquished vanity will thwart this terrible affliction, nor save dear Serena from the clutches of the vile beast.
It matters not. Tonight I return to the information battleground (my bedroom) with a memory-stick full of highly potent spyware removal programs and a righteous heart. If The Kraken paints my floral print wallpaper with my blood again tonight then tomorrow I will just keep fighting, and returning, and fighting again and again, every day until one of us is either deleted or dead. I owe Serena that much. Her hard drive has gone flaccid, her interior fan clogged with dust, and her memory would be frail for a semi-retarded goldfish. But she is my computer. And I will see her through.
Your loving friend,
Action Squid
No comments:
Post a Comment