The Mac and I

There is nothing like change to tell you how old you are. If you look upon it as a challenge, as a source of excitement and growth, you are young. If you look upon it as an intruder come to disrupt your careful, comfortable routine, if you judge a thing just because it is different, you are old.

If that hypothesis isn't clear enough, if you need more proof, here it is. I recently measured myself on the change scale and guess what it said? OLD. No hesitation, no second thoughts. OLD.

It all started with the MacBook. I'm a little wary of laptops as it is. Give me one, and I time travel back to the days when I was a computer novice, when typing double quotes was the biggest challenge because it involved pressing two keys simultaneously. I remember my lab pardner and me coming up with a novel solution - I press shift she presses quote. On count of three. We got quite good at it, actually. Teamwork, i believe it is called. And don't even get me started on the laptop mouse. That takes me back several generations, i remind myself of my grandmother struggling with the mouse. Not being able to co-relate the movement of the mouse with the movement of the cursor, tracing crazy patterns all over the screen. Thankfully, my company does not give laptops, at least not to novices. I work in what i like to call a third world company, but that's another story.

But the Macbook is not just a laptop. It is a Mac laptop. Its different. What makes it especially bad is that it is unexpected. I mean, having seen two and a half operating systems, you think you have seen it all. How different can this one be, you think. And while no one in their right mind will call me a geek, calling me technologically challenged is an insult to our temple of education. And, its not like I wanted to change the world. All I was after were the basic functions.

First, i thought i would to watch a movie. It all started well. I got a head start because the knowledgeable one told me that two fingers on the mouse area meant a right click. So i could select the player i wanted and all was right with the world. Until the first interrupt. I decided to minimize the movie and service the interrupt. When i got back, the movie was gone! I looked everywhere, but all i could find was the icon of the player. Clicked on it, got the entire menu of the player, but not the movie screen.

I decided to move on. To blog my frustration on the lost movie screen. But i couldn't find anyplace where i could enter text! And believe me, i searched! No list of applications anywhere. No command line kind of thing. Things could have gotten unpleasant for the Mac had i been slightly more egoistic. The knowledgeable one to the rescue again. I reluctantly got introduced to the finder.

My journey to enlightenment was accompanied by incessant cribbing, partly because i really hated being so helpless around a computer, but mostly because the knowledgeable one has a short fuse and i love fireworks!

Anyway, now i have made my peace with the Mac. I still lose movie screens occasionally, but now i simply restart the movie. And as for text documents, part of this post was typed on the Mac.

You may now clap.