2/10/18

My Computer is Alive

My computer is some sort of inter-dimensional being. There's just no other explanation. And I say that because, yes, I have, in fact, ruled out demons. No, the thing is actually alive. That fact is part of why I'm writing this from a different computer.

It all started about six, maybe seven years ago, at a Best Buy in a large Southern Nevada suburb. I went in with my dad because it was finally time to replace the HP desktop computer I was still using despite the fact that it had so many replacement parts that the front part of the shell no longer fit on the tower. Dad, Mom, and my sister had each recently made the transition to Macs, but I was stubborn and wanted to stick with Windows. Dad was there to collect the Macs, while my job was to select a laptop I could actually live with. I browsed loosely, glancing at hardware specs I understood either barely or not at all, poking at keyboards and touchpads, and generally looking for something I wouldn't hate.

And then I saw it, all the way from the other end of the row. I still made myself stop at a couple of others and give them cursory glances, but something about the stupid huge one at the end of the line drew me in. I actually understood quite a few of the specs, like 1TB hard drive, and could make reasonable guesses about others, like that that brand made pretty good graphics cards ('that brand' being NVIDIA). But like all the other laptops, I didn't really understand what most of it meant back then. Still, I had been informed that I would pick one that day, and this was the only one I actually liked. Dad came over, approved of the construction and the specs, and gave the still somewhat reluctant okay. The salesman came back a couple minutes later and said that they didn't have any others in the back, but if we wanted to take it home that day we could have the floor model. My dad jumped on the opportunity to push me towards a slightly higher end model, but I hated it, so I took the floor model of the ridiculously large Dell labeled 'Portable Desktop' for pretty cheap. My father was convinced we'd be back to replace it within a month. He wasn't far off.

I loved my new computer. It was my first laptop, and it brought with it the newly released Windows 8 which no one had yet realized was actually terrible. Granted, the 18" screen limited portability quite a bit, and the thing was no lightweight, but it was still more portable than a computer tower. But something was wrong with the battery. So after three months we took it back to the Geek Squad, where the guy who sold it to me took one look at the screen and said "Wow! That's amazing! I've never seen anything thing like that before in my life!" Umm... They shipped it out to Kentucky under warranty to replace the removable battery (because that's totally logical) and I took a break from adjusting from XP to 8 to deal with the shock of having to replace my Motorola RAZR with multiple buttons rendered nonfunctional from overuse with a Samsung Note 2. That was a rough few months for me, learning curve wise. It didn't help that the Geek Squad team would mutter about strange activity around the computer every time I checked it in.

It didn't have any more battery problems after that, but the keyboard... Two more times, we were back for repairs on a computer purchased within the last 12 months. Two more times, the man who sold me that thing told me he'd never seen anything like it before and became deeply troubled and confused when I assured him that he had sold it to me. The second time was the truly memorable one. He was so convinced that I was wrong that he looked up the purchase records and then spent the rest of the tech support consultation repeatedly asking himself why he couldn't remember the computer, only me. I was beginning to ask that myself, and a few other questions from the way it sometimes behaved. That was when I finally stopped blowing off the rest of my concerns as simply being part of the OS transition and started paying attention. Especially after he left that screen up and one of the other techs came over, looked at what was going on, looked at his screen, and said "Uh, why don't we have any intake records for this thing?" "What? Yeah we do, they're right there. It says I've worked on this thing twice, but I can't remember it, and I could swear she got a Mac..." "No, I mean for store inventory. I can't find any paperwork on this thing older than her father's original purchase receipt and I also don't see anything about this model anywhere else in our database."

...What?

And then, when I was picking it up from being shipped out for repairs for the third time in a year (that time they replaced the keyboard with what they said was the same model, but the original keyboard did not have so many function buttons or responsive backlighting.), the tech who had noticed that the computer apparently didn't have a paper trail prior to me taking possession handed it back to me and said while still holding the other end, "Now remember, we'll only do these warranty repairs so many times. If you bring this thing in again, we're going to take it away and give you another laptop in exchange." My dad wanted to exchange it on the spot, but I said "Okay, I understand." and took the thing. It never had a hardware problem again. Instead, that was when things got really weird.

The first thing I noticed was that iTunes was becoming my metric for how well the rest of the computer was running. If iTunes was working horribly, everything was fine. If iTunes was working correctly, something somewhere was very, very wrong. However, I could always get it working again by knocking on various parts of the shell in a very specific and progressively more complicated (but always intuitive to me and me alone) pattern.

The second thing I noticed what that the computer ran half as fast whenever anyone else was using it. I really wish that I meant that as an exaggeration.

The third thing developed slowly over the course of several months, after I had had the device for about a year and a half. It started screwing around with individual browser speeds. Incrementally over time, Firefox and Chrome became slower as Internet Explorer became faster and faster. When it peaked, Firefox was slow but sort of okay, Chrome would take five whole minutes just to start, and IE was faster than any other browser on anyone else's computer on any wifi at any time. This lasted for two years when I was around 17-18, and then gradually reverted over another six month span, totaling three years of my deliberately using IE over Firefox or Chrome and getting better results because of it.

The fourth thing was that it would randomly turn itself on and off during the night. Sometimes I hear it whirring and when I look over, it's just turned the screen on. I've only ever seen the lock screen, but I've also seen it doing this while it's shut, so I don't know for certain what it does during those times. When it first started about 5 years ago, I used to turn it off, unplug it, and remove the battery before going to sleep, but then it started giving me random glitches, so I stopped. Now I just let it do its thing.

It continues to be an enigma, so I refer to it as the Voidbeast. I'm not actually sure where it came from and neither are the people who sold it to me, so my best guess is that it spawned itself into the back room of my local Best Buy and just kind of mind-controlled the staff into selling it.

It adapted pretty well when I moved about 3,000 miles Northeast for college, but that was when it fully and completely became clear to me that it only likes bad wifi. If I have a good, reliable connection to the internet, chances are it's the worst signal on the block. I've hosted AOEII multiplayer games where my friends in major cities who had high-end ethernet found that my crappy college-kid-in-a-rural-area wifi was more stable.

In the spring of my sophomore year, it started getting really glitchy just as I took a job at a popup call center for a political candidate (I'd rather not say which one, it was an experience that left me with a deep sense of disillusionment, and I spent most my earnings from it on alcohol.), so I showed it to some friends who build computers for fun. As I handed it to one of them, I was holding it by the two left corners, and he took it by the back right corner only. As I let go, it shot a small plastic chip port guard out of the front right corner six inches straight up and bopped him squarely on the tip of the nose. Six years I'd had that computer, and I had no idea that was there. Neither of us had touched it. Not a great start. This was followed by a combination of my group of friends being awed by the image quality and asking why I was using Windows 8 of all things.

It then proceeded to spend the next several hours making random hissing noises as the three of them ran several malware scans and cleaners, geeked out over my screen resolution, and unsuccessfully attempted to find anything about the particular model of Dell anywhere online at all, including the Dell website. They came to two conclusions: the first was that the computer had been really cutting edge a few years earlier and the screen was still great, and the second was that it didn't actually exist. They also found a lot of malware, and helped me set up some more protection since the antivirus I had at the time wasn't very good. After listening to my account of the machine's history, one of them offered me the phone number of the local Catholic priest, which confused me since he is Orthodox Presbyterian and I'm Lutheran, and recommended exorcism. The guy who got attacked in the face by my laptop just said "How much homework do you have in the next couple weeks? Because I have a screwdriver in my car..." I declined both options. I needed it too much for homework.

I have determined, however, that it is not a demon. After proper testing was conducted, It was determined that the device was neither possessed nor malevolent, it simply is. It's a living, feeling being just like any other. I can tell because it's been pouting all week. You see, seven years is a long life for a laptop, and in the interest of not having to frantically recover data from the hard drive post-self-destruction, my new laptop arrived last week. That's what I'm writing this post from.

The summer after that I had two 400 level three-week summer intensives back to back. It was an awesome learning opportunity which nearly killed me and I would do it again in a heartbeat but I really do not recommend it to anyone with an ounce of sanity. As a way to distract myself from this lunacy on the two day weekend between the two courses (and to distract myself from the diagnosis I'd received in regard to how badly I'd blown out my bum knee), I allowed the Voidbeast to finally make the free upgrade to Windows 10.

Not good timing, not. at. all.

Booting Windows 10 for the first time, the first thing I checked was iTunes. It was perfect. Well, crap. It actually took me a while to figure out where the creature was venting its feelings, turns out it was the wifi signal. It refused to stay connected for more than about 30min at a time, and would only reconnect if I totally rebooted the machine. There was only one way to keep it connected, which I found the following weekend: I wouldn't lose the signal if I was connected to my friend's multiplayer minecraft server.

Well, then.

I got through the second week of the second class (hunting for sources for a research paper) by building an impenetrable, inaccessible by means apart from teleportation or tower building safety box on the server, putting myself inside it, and switching tabs while still connected. Boom. Stable access to JSTOR. My professor thought it was one of the most creative fixes she'd ever heard of, and this was while I was using a copy of La Morte D'Arthur which I had rebound by nailing it to the inside of a box of fruit snacks and reinforcing with duct tape and rubber bands (a story for another day, but she said that that was a very beautiful piece of redneck engineering in its own right.).

This wasn't sustainable, however, so I took the beast to my school's IT department and explained what was going on after lunch one day during the final week. The girl who checked it in clearly thought that I was crazy, but she wrote down what I said and prepared to run a few tests. I was emailed very early the following morning with news that they had fixed it and asking me to pick it up as soon as possible. As a string of horrific flashbacks to the sort of things the Geek Squad back on the West Coast used to say it did flashed through my mind, I crutch-raced back to the IT basement. The same girl was there, and apparently after they ran their tests and then had multiple people look it over, they were pretty sure it was fixed. She set it on the counter, looked at it, shuddered, and said that I was good to go. "Okay, um... did it do, you know, anything weird?" I asked as I began to pack up. "Yeah! Actually, yeah, it did!" She said, struggling to take her eyes off the computer long enough to look me in the eye, "Do you have our card?" "Umm... No?" "Good! Bye! Have a nice summer!" By this point she was making pushing motions at the desk where the computer had been sitting and her smile looked very pained. As I turned to go, I saw her give my backpack a long stare and shudder one more time before turning away.

I'm still not entirely sure what happened, but I definitely got the message that I wasn't welcome back there again. So ever since, whenever the Voidbeast gets too uppity, I threaten to take it back to BestBuy. There isn't one in this county, but the mere threat is usually enough to make it behave.

It behaved through my entire junior year, but this year the number of times it wakes up in the night have increased exponentially. I began researching replacement models a few months ago because I know it's getting near to death, so when it had a rather spectacular freezing episode recently that resulted in -I kid you not- seven and a half straight hours of troubleshooting and scans, we decided that it would be best to have the next model here, running, and connected to my data before the creature returns to the void from whence it came. But I can't really bring myself to get rid of it. It's bonded to me somehow, whatever it is. I've determined that it's not malevolent, so I see no reason to abandon it. I'm just not using it as a laptop anymore. The new unit is an Ubuntu machine anyways, so having it as a desktop still running the Windows 10 I know has been really helpful in the transition. The Voidbeast is being moody about it though, and I'm not really sure how to console it. I'm not getting rid of it though, I just can't. It's alive, after all, and it needs me. The new laptop is much easier to trace though, it's from a company called System 76, and I don't think it's alive. But it's only been a week, and I'm still learning the new (to me) OS, so who knows?

If the new hardware is alive as well, I hope it makes friends with the Voidbeast. Voidy's been my roommate for 7 years now. We've crossed oceans and climbed mountains together. People can tell me to get rid of this thing all they want, but the bond runs pretty deep at this point. For better or worse, I have a sentient inter-dimensional being manifesting as my computer. And you know what?

I'm okay with that.

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