Road Apples
Oct. 6, 2008

Easy to follow instructions included

By Tim Sanders

Gerald was in the living room, lying on the couch with a wet washcloth on his forehead. “Maybe you can talk to him,” his wife said. “He’s been like this since yesterday afternoon.”

I’ve known Gerald for several years. If sixty is indeed the new forty, then by my calculations Gerald is only about forty-seven, tops.

“Hi, Gerald,” I said. “Hear you’ve had some trouble.”

Gerald blinked a few times, and I thought I saw a glimmer of recognition in his eyes.

“Just leave the pizza with Eugenia. She’ll pay you,” he said.

“No, Gerald, it’s me, Tim.”

“TIM? HAHAHAHAHAHA! Oh, pleeeeze, take it away, Tim!”

“Take what away, Gerald?”

“TAKE IT AWAY! IT’S A TOOL OF SATAN. AND IT’S ALL GOTTEN INSIDE MY HEAD! I GOT BRAIN WORMS, NOW!”

Eugenia tapped me on the shoulder. “He’s talking about our new computer,” she explained. “I told him we needed a professional to hook it up, but no, he said he could do it. He said he’d learned by watching the guy hook up our old one.”

“Give me that instruction pamphlet again,” he said, apparently unaware that he was already clutching it in his left hand.

“Eugenia took it from his trembling hand, rustled it around a bit, and gave it back to him.”

“AHA!” he exclaimed. “See here, it starts out just like it should. ‘SETTING UP YOUR COMPUTER,’ it says. And then it says: ‘Configuration de l’ordinateur,’ ‘como configurar o computador,’ and ‘einrichten ihres computers,’ as if that gobbledygook should mean anything to me. And looky here on the next page: captions like CAUTION, PRECAUCION, CUIDADO, and VORSICHT!, all followed by several paragraphs in itsy bitsy print to accommodate printing the same stupid instructions over and over again in fourteen stinking different languages. By the time you’ve fetched your magnifying glass you’ve forgotten where you were and have to start all over again! GOOD LORD, IF THE COMPUTER COMPANIES WANT TO SELL COMPUTERS IN THE UNITED STATES, THEY OUGHTA PRINT THEIR MANUALS IN ENGLISH! Let the French, the Spanish, the Germans and the Swahilis go home and get instruction manuals in their own languages. OOOH-HAHAHAHA! I can’t … I can’t take … I can’t … HAHAHAHAHA! DAMN THE TORPEDOES, FULL SPEED AHEAD!”

Eugenia replaced the washcloth on his forehead with a fresh one. It had plenty of ice in it. “Don’t mention passwords to him,” she whispered.

“PASSWORDS?” Apparently Gerald’s wet rag hadn‘t impaired his hearing. “Oh my yes … I got passwords, you got passwords, all God’s chillun’s got passwords!” Here he stopped and grabbed my hand. “Hey Norman,” he said.

I told him my name was Tim, and he agreed that the name sounded reasonable. “Thing is, Norman, do you remember when all you had to do to hook something electrical up was to stick a plug into a socket? REMEMBER THAT, NORMAN?”

I said that yes, I did.

“But not anymore. NOOOOOO! Now to hook up your printer, or your scanner, or to reconnect to the internet, you gotta stick a CD into the slot and have user names and administrative names and PIN numbers and above all, PASSWORDS! AND WHAT DID I TELL EUGENIA ELEVEN YEARS AGO? Ask her, Norman, ask her! I … I … OH LORDY, ASK HER!”

I didn’t have to ask her, she told me; “He said we should use one password for everything, and that way we’d never forget it. He wanted to use ‘Willie Mays’ for our password, because he was the greatest centerfielder of all time, and nobody could forget that name. But everybody knows you can’t use a common name like that, and everybody knows all of your passwords have to be different, because--”

Gerald was shaking like a leaf in a windstorm, now. “B-Because now instead of t-typing in good old, reliable ‘Willie M-M-M-Mays,’ we’re digging through old scraps of p-p-paper in the desk looking for p-passwords like ‘carbuncle9j’ and ‘Oprahgirl67’ and ‘boogidy-boogidy-boogidy’ and so forth because we forgot ’em and can’t proceed without ‘em! OPRAHGIRL! OH LORD, YOU MAY FIRE WHEN READY, G-G-GRIDLEY!”

Eugenia went out for some Tylenol, but Gerald didn‘t notice: “ AND THAT AIN’T THE HALF OF IT! WHAT REALLY TOOK THE CAKE WAS THAT STUPID WIDESCREEN MONITOR!”

“It didn’t work?”

“Oh, you betcha it worked. It took all our family photos which I had sweated over and saved onto a CD before the old machine died and went to Hell, and it stretched brothers and sisters and in-laws out like so many distorted Frisbees with ears. I told Eugenia yesterday that her momma resembled a toad frog in tennis shoes, and never mind it was all the new monitor’s fault, she come all unglued and got to badmouthing my daddy, who never did her any harm whatsoever. And then we discovered that after all these years the CD to hook up the printer had disappeared, and the tech support people are all located in Calcutta … and then little Hadji said … he said … did Mr. Gerald want a nice shiny new satellite dish … no, my personal ID number … or access code … AAAARGH …”

Gerald had slipped off into his own little world again.

Eugenia took me into the den and showed me what was left of their new computer. Three rounds of buckshot had completely destroyed the monitor, the tower, the keyboard, and what had probably been a very nice photo of Eugenia’s mother, the toad woman, hanging on the opposite wall.

I stopped by Gerald’s couch on the way out the door, and heard him mumbling.

“… c-con-control panel, cursor, d-database, d-defragmentation, d-disk … disk drive, download, eBay, eBay, eBay, Ethernet, file, f-folder, gig … g-gig … gigabyte, g-google … ”

Eugenia told me not to disturb him. “He’s going through his computer alphabet again,” she said. “The words comfort him, even if he doesn’t know what they mean. When he gets to ‘virtual memory’ and ‘zoom box,’ he’ll either start all over again or ask for more shotgun shells.”

I told her I was sorry I couldn’t be of any help. She said not to worry, she’d hidden the shotgun, and besides, the Mental Health people would be there soon. She’d already spoken to them on the phone, and they’d told her they’d seen a lot of this lately. They called it your Basic Human Hard Drive Fragmentation Syndrome, and said they had a program which would make Gerald right as rain again. It was something put together by the Norton Anti-Virus people, and it required only a Die-Hard battery and a pair of low-tech jumper cables.