I Do My Best Thinking When I'm Not

. . . thinking, that is. I bought a Mac laptop on sale from MBPP (My Benevolent Patriarchal Plantation) yesterday. They told me, "Well, you've come over from the Dark Side," and I figured there must be some history there beween PCs and Macs. I'd be curious, but I'm not. I mean, they are tools, not people. They don't run our lives.

So I took my tool and promptly froze with fear at how to initialize it, since my last computer (a Dell PC, on sale from a Parade Magazine ad for $599) always said, "Welcome, BoBYWWPA," or some such thing, because I hit "Uzbekia" instead of "United States" when I first programmed it. It never left and certain operations were forever not allowed because it didn't recognize non-cyrillic writing. But that's another story, and you know it now, so you don't think I'm completely techphobic.

But I did stare at the box that contained my GPS last July (birthday present from Brother Dear With Money) for a month before I opened it. Now I'm completely smitten with Hilda, my GPS and savior.

So a kid at work hooked me up (ain't that the way?) and I took it home to my comcast + router wireless set up. The Dell would take an hour to get to the net sometimes, but I figured with this pretty white petite Mac, that problem would be history. The little white Mac worked well on MBPP's wireless system, but when I took it home and turned it on (yes, it had been battery charged; I can read), nothing. It wanted a password for my MARCIA network, and when I finally found that little piece of paper that Parapura Rajkumar (my brilliant, young, and handsome downstairs neighbor) set up, I put it in with a grin on my face. Nothing. "Cannot connect." I tried all the passwords I could think of, threw in a few more possible names, cursed, paced, almost burned dinner, messed with it some more, and finally went to sleep. Frickin' tools. I thought they were here to serve us, not the other way around!!!!

At approximately 3 a.m. (I'd guess) a thought came: take the machine closer to the router when you turn it on, and try the password in lower case. I went back to sleep, calm and happy.


In the morning, I tried it closer to the router and used lower case for the password. It worked like a dream.

The moral of the story? I do my best thinking when I'm not.

Later, kiddos