What I'm trying to say here folks is simply that if it's a gizmo, gadget, or widget, it will not work for me the way it's intended to work, and works for everyone else on the planet.
Before I go on, I'm gonna stop and just reiterate that you can direct all of your hate mail care of "ssoul.dmsdiscretion@gmail.com" where I will gladly take note that you took the time to email me, and then delete your message. I say this because I know at this point, at least one person in the world is scoffing to himself and composing an angry letter that's something to the effect of "Dear Sarcastic Soul, I am writing to notify you of several grievous errors you made in your depiction of Cybertron. First of all, you cannot construct a cross out of Energon, as it is incredibly rare and valuable. Second of all, Optimus Prime cannot possibly hate you, because he is the greatest hero of the Autobots who, by the way, would NEVER accept peace with the Decepticons over the death of-" and then I would cut you off. Because if this is in fact anything similar to what you're currently pondering, I'm just gonna take a shot in the dark here and guess that natural light and relationships with women aren't your strong points. By the way, spoiler alert for every Transformers plot ever: Optimus dies at least once. Every time. Look it up.
The reason I bring all this up, believe it or not, isn't just to enrage Transformers lore nerdlings. It's because lately, I have been reminded of this fact in more ways than I care to count and it's making me sad.
Take my car, for instance. Please. Take it. I mean, pay me for it first, but just take it. When I got it, I called it the Strawberry Fields Forever Mobile because the previous owner smoked like a chimney. In order to fix this issue, the dealer equipped it with a very, very strong black cherry air freshener. Problem was, it didn't smell like black cherry, it smelled like strawberries. For a very long time, even after I removed the air freshener. The scent eventually faded, of course, and over time it's earned a new nickname. The Duralast Kevorkian. Why? Because it helps ailing batteries to their deaths. Slowly. Through the equivalent of electrical strangulation. Except that the batteries aren't ailing until it's had a few days alone with them, so it's really more like regular murder instead of assisted suicide. It destroys a battery at least once every two weeks, and sometimes as much as twice in one week in the winter. Fortunately, the warranty on the batteries lasts a whole lot longer, so I get a free one every single time it happens! Autozone hates me too.
Then you have my computer. Oh sweet baby Jesus do you have my computer. I have never had any luck with computers. The first computer I ever bought was a Dell Dimension E310 desktop computer which was basically Dell code for "some crap we found in the warehouse and threw together one drunken evening." That thing caused me more grief than a funeral, and I hated it. In fact, I hated it so much that when I finally put it out of its misery and decided it was time for a new computer, I decided I was going to get the best computer money could buy. I wanted THE best, because I had been dealing so long with the WORST. So I saved for a little over a full year (in my unemployed pre-college years) and bought myself an Alienware Area 51 m9750 performance gaming laptop. $2000 for one laptop, but it was so worth it. Or so I thought. It ran wonderfully for about the first year that I had it, but then a dark truth began to emerge; about a year or so before I bought the laptop, the Alienware company had been bought out. By Dell. For those of you who have never owned a Dell computer, where the hell have you been since the early 2000's? But seriously, there's a little rule that exists with Dell computers. They will die. Within two years. And it will be catastrophic. Because Dell builds computers to die within two years. And my Alienware was no exception. This thing has had more hard drive failures, bluescreen crashes and catastrophic failures in the past four years I've owned it than any other computer I've seen.
Why do I bring all this up, you ask? Well, according to the angry Facebook messages on my timeline yesterday I'd say it's safe to wager that some of my more observant readers noticed a distinct lack of update. The reason for this is because I had an update written out earlier in the week, and decided to set the Blogger schedule option to auto-post it on Wednesday. Thinking I was being all clever with my making use of the technology available to me, I didn't bother to check the damn thing until I figured I would have a good number of views. By the time I realized it hadn't updated, it was late in the afternoon and I had absolutely no inspiration or motivation to write anything, and I couldn't remember enough of what I'd written the day before to re-write it. So it went unwritten. And for that, I apologize.
To tell the truth, I have no idea why I thought even for an instant that the auto-updater was going to work for me. That kind of thing never works for me. It's not any fault of Blogger's, it's just that technology is forever conspiring against me to make everything I touch turn on me in some kind of horrible fashion. This is the reason I don't ever plan to own a smartphone. I'm fairly sure that it would eventually transform into a little monster machine and murder me in my sleep.
I think one of the best examples of technology doing its damnedest to destroy my life comes from last semester at the end of finals week. I had been taking a creative writing course and I had two revised short stories I needed to turn in by a five o'clock deadline. I went to print them out, but my printer decided it was going to pick that day to run out of ink, so I did the next logical thing and tried to upload them to Google Documents. I had been using this service for the entire semester with no issues, so I expected things to go smoothly when I tried to use it again. Except this time, the damn thing was ready for me. Instead of uploading my document files, it actually destroyed the save backups for both of my short stories. I was able to recover one of them, but the other was completely gone. The only version of it I had left was the completely unedited one, and I had no time left to try and edit it again. I was starting to panic at that point, so I threw the unedited version onto a flash drive with my other story and booked it to the campus. I figured I'd just use the computer lab in the English complex to print them off, and then hand them in to the office. Except that the computer lab was locked. Along with every other computer lab. I had to frantically search the entire campus from the English complex to Narnia, sprinting from building to building until I finally found a functioning computer in the library computer lab. Which then took its sweet time booting up and logging me in, so that I'd already lost another twenty minutes on my clock by the time they were printed. And the printer smeared every page with gigantic black ink burns. Every single page looked as if the Satan of technology himself had scarred each page with some kind of dark omen in the form of a malfunctioning printer. As I looked around, nobody else's papers looked like this. Just mine. And because it was the only printer left that was still printing, I just ran with what I had. I went to grab the only stapler in the entire building and opened it. One single staple remained inside. Breathing a sigh of relief, I clamped it down on the corner of my partially destroyed packet. And the staple promptly bent, folded, and slid off the page. There were no other staples to be found. So I sprinted back across campus, up the stairs to the top floor and made it to the English office... Seventeen minutes late. Every employee in that office had packed up and left at exactly five o'clock, and I was standing outside of a dark, locked office at 5:17. So I slid my unstapled, ink-smeared, wind-creased, unedited story under my professor's desk and walked home.
Fortunately, I still made a B in the class because I've had that professor before, and she understands that technology hates me and took pity on me.
This is the reason I don't ever take online courses. I would fail every single one of them. My lecture videos and project files wouldn't download correctly. My finished assignments wouldn't save or upload. Exam time would come around and I would open the page only to get a window that said something like "Error 404 - Exam Not Found. P.S. We're watching you, asshole. Sincerely, Definitely Not Optimus Prime." And it might be just me, but I'm fairly sure that "my computer hates me and I'm receiving death threats from Cybertron" won't hold up very well when I'm trying to explain to the Dean why I have an F in an online art appreciation class.
-The Sarcastic Soul-
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