I had to squeeze through a narrowing gap of patience to reach this spot, to put these letters together into a sentence.  I turned on the computer to write another post.  I followed the same procedure I've always followed to get to my Blogger Dashboard.  A guard in the form of a Google Blogger checkpoint Tron cop asked me to write my password.  I couldn't remember it.  I have it written down on a piece of paper underneath a mound of other papers.  I didn't feel like looking for it.  I followed the advice offered, to create a new password.  I wrote down some new gobbledygook, rewrote it in the space below, wrote the new gobbledygook on a post-it note.  I was then presented with several screens of security recommendations--add additional phone number, another e-mail, calculate pi to the 937th digit using just a compass, pencil, and slide rule.  After a few more screens of multi-layered security suggestions I began to notice I seemed to be going in circles.  Pi, indeed.
     Throughout this thirty minute aggravation, I yelled at the computer.  There is no inanimate object I feel more revulsion for when it doesn't work for me than a computer.  My minimal knowledge of how to work the things contributes mostly to my frustration.  I yell at it like I would never yell at a person or an animal.  It's plastic and circuits.  I assume it can handle the abuse.  Its brain is primitive artificial intelligence, part of a hive mind when linked to the Internet.  It has no feelings.  In me, though, when I don't understand what I'm supposed to do with it, it inspires anger and hatred.
     Some think it's foolish to yell at inanimate objects, but for me it's an expression of hot anger I'm getting out of my system right away, rather than storing it for later.  Some people drop dead eventually because they don't express their emotions enough.  One of the characters in Mike Judge's masterpiece about the mid-level technical working world, Office Space, hates the copy machine they have to use.  It jams every time he uses it, he talks to it almost like a hurt lover on the verge of violence.  Later, after he and his two colleagues pull off their embezzlement scheme, they steal the copier and take it to a field, going to town on it mob-style, with baseball bats.
     My frustration, when computers confuse me, stems from my avoidance of them when I was young and could've learned at a fresh age.  In my high school there were two computer courses taught, using what would now be considered funny-looking machines.  Still, the students who, around 1980, took those classes, saw the utility of that machine and what was coming.  Two computer students I knew continued in that field, quite successfully.  Why didn't I take those classes?  I wasn't interested.  This lack of interest led eventually to my occasional one-sided curse-ridden berating of plastic and circuits.  If I understood more about this fucking thing I'm using to write this, I'd save myself some irritation.
     But Vic, some might suggest, you can still learn more about computers.
     Yes, but I'm not interested.

                                                                                 Vic Neptune