:mattLandia:

Darwin would be terribly dissapointed in me. You see, try as my body might, my corpus temporalis simply refuses to evolve into a functioning cyborg. When I was young, I thought for sure I'd have red electronic eyes and bionic fingers by the time I was 30. To my dismay, I am not evolving, rather devolving into a man tormented by pavlovian responses to the invisible cybernetic gremlins that live in all pc's. Consider the following:

1 - Anytime my Intel Pentium 4 microprocessor starts to choke on the volume of computations I've tasked it, it whines in complaint, as though to say "are you out of your damn mind? You really expect ME to do THAT for you right NOW?!" I'm sure you know the sound, the high pitched chugging rythm of millions of microscopic sledgehammers banging away at a slab of silicon. The second I hear this sound, my chest gets tight, my eyes dialate and feel as though I may in fact burst into self mutilating flames. And this is how I feel before my snickers and Dr. Pepper in the morning....

2 - I am haunted by the floating, white, demonic hourglass cursor! Enduring the hourglass cursor is the equivalent of sitting on hold with Comcast cable for 40 minutes only to have someone pick up and say "Hold eh-pleeze" and then accidently disconnect you. I never know when or where the hourglass will appear, but when she does appear, that digital sucubus (thanks Fred Toucher for reminding of me a good word), my head constricts into an ice-pick headache, I break into a manic sweat and grip my desk in a French Guinea death hold.

3 - "Error 404 - File Not Found". Is there a lower circle of information hell!? After minutes of trolling through Google looking for a decent article on "Articulated Cow Knuckles" I am empty handed at a closed door called 404. It's a wonder I'm not bald what with all my compusive hair pulling I suffer in response to an "Error 404". If I ever find that file... I will KICK. ITS. ASS. Seriously.

4 - The sk --ipping m ou se bal l. Ho w amI suppos edtoen ure a mous e that won''t ro llsmoo thly?!!! You call this contraption a "mouse"? This skipping plastic contraption is a shard of glass in my eye; a rabid cat in my speedo; a mouthful of gasoline soaked tacks. If you skip again you damn mouse, I swear I will hunt down your whole right-clickn'-center-scrolling family and throw you all into a raging hell pit where your only hope of escape is to reconstruct the Mona Lisa using nothing but PowerPoint clip art and a stick of glue.

Sorry, I was trying to wrap up but my pc was hanging up agai...