Snit Time

I freely admit it. Yesterday, I was in a full-blown snit.

Not pretty, I have to say. And not cool, unlike the cause or object (haven’t decided which) of the snit.

Which is ironic, because I bought the damn thing out of sheer vanity—yes, I do have some—and it has done exactly what I wanted it to do.

Be cool.

All right, no fool like an old fool. The hero of this piece is a 2500$ piece of excrement called the MacBook Pro. I bought it and fell in love with it and was instantly intimidated.

The first problem was turning it on.

Does anyone remember a time when machines had buttons that said—in red letters—“power?” Or maybe “On / Off?”

This elegant creature before me has an almost invisible circle on the right side of the base. Within it is a tiny grey circle—virtually indistinguishable from the aluminum case—broken by a vertical line.

It’s characteristic Mac. If you know it’s there—great! But for the rest of us?

Take the little tiny dots that live under the programs on the dock. Doña Taí pointed them out. “When they’re illuminated, that means the program is running.”

Oh!

I hadn’t noticed them.

The same is true for the devices. I had to have an iPod, and of course was intimidated by that as well. What I didn’t know—until I pressed it by mistake—was where the volume was. I mean, come on, Steve—a device to play music with no volume control? Hunh?  And how come everyone else had theirs blaring, and mine only whispered?

Worse came when for no reason whatsoever the track jumped—I’d be in the third movement of a different symphony. What? Even crazier was to hear the B Minor Mass and get the resurrection before the crucifixion.

The little iPod has a shuffle button, you see. And just by making a sudden movement, it jumps merrily to a random track. Oh, and by the way, Steve, notice my use of the word “tracks?” Some of us use the iPod to listen to something other than hip-hop, reggaeton, and the rest. “852 songs” my iPod is reported as containing. Wrong—there are rhapsodies, partitas, suites, and lied as well.

So there I’d be, on my morning walk, and bing! I was six movements from where I had started (musically speaking).

It turns out the iPod has a tiny elegant icon next to the “play” arrow.

And I have relatively big fingers.

So that drove me nuts for weeks—until I devoted an hour or two (OK, have that nowadays…) to learning how to disable it.

But it was nothing like the problem with the iPad. This device has this cool feature—it shifts from landscape to portrait depending on how you hold it. Totally cool, except when—as I did—I tried to open an attachment John’s secretary had scanned sideways. It opened fine, but the screen kept changing every time I flipped the device. The document was always sideways.

“Oh,” cried John, “I know what to do about that!”

He was excited to be able to tell me.

“Put the iPad very gently on the side of the table. Then, tiptoe to the OTHER side, and read it standing up!”

Right…and don’t breathe on it, either.

I suppose Steve would manage to look cool doing that in public, but me? The guy who can barely balance a tray of food?

Nothing, however, is as terrible, as awful, as infuriating as iTunes. That iPod I have? It’s synched with another computer.

Now dead.

And apparently, there is no easy way for me to sync to a new computer without losing…

…those 852 “songs.”

I’ll tell you what this feels like. High School! Remember the cool kids—the kids who never got acne, who had the right cars and clothes, who got the right girls? (OK, not a big issue for me….) That’s what the Mac experience is all about.

And guess what! I’ll never graduate—never! I will ALWAYS be 17, pus-filled, acned, gangly, and seven-footed (most of them tangled with the others….).

So, Steve? This is what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna go find—if I can—my computer whisperer. I’m gonna have him rip out the guts of your beautiful machine. Then I’m gonna put the innards of a decent machine—Toshiba, maybe—in your gorgeous, eviscerated beast.

And look totally cool in the coffee shop!