Mental Hygiene the best thing you've done for your brain all day

i’m fat. tubby, chubby, a chunky muffin.

i’ve been this way since i finished college and moved on to the ‘real world’ (and not the one mtv would like us to believe in, where beautiful college students and dropouts all live together happily for awhile in a big-ass house that someone else pays for and get in little arguments about who’s not sleeping with whom, and everything ends up just being cute and obnoxious and nothing at all like your life will ever be). i know that my problem, along with the millions of other americans who are, like myself, overweight, is that my caloric intake is greater than my energy expended – and not due to a glandular or genetic predisposition like some people would like to believe.

don’t get me wrong, i believe there are a lot of people who just cannot, for varying reasons, lose weight. i am not one of these people. i am fat, and i know exactly why. i eat too damned much, and don’t exercise enough.

and this is not a cry for help. i don’t want richard simmons’ chubby ass beating down my door, insisting that i jump around like a fool and listen to oldies while he soothes my crying eyes with some little speech about the thin person screaming to get out from inside me. kiss my ass, simmons, big as it is, and get out.

i work at one desk all day, then come home and sit behind another one, futzing on the computer. granted, this is how i make my living, but still, if it’s not sitting at the computer – like i am right this very moment, damn – it’s lounging on the couch, watching television.

and so, i’m going to change that. i’m going to lose some weight, finally, instead of packing it on, eventually to reach critical mass and start burning brightly as my fuel supply is burned off in the great, gravity-driven furnace of my own hugeness.

i have actually started working out on a regular basis – stairmaster (which royally kicks my ass at the lowest setting), stationary bike (good thing it’s stationary, because i can’t ride the actual mobile kind at all), and freeweights. every other day i do that, and on off days, i lie on my back watching tv and try to catch my breath. actually, i do sit-ups and crunches until i can’t stand any more, then wait for the next commercial and do it all again. not a bad routine, methinks.

but still, the results can’t come fast enough. i must examine my lifestyle, and compare it to the only time in recent memory that i was actively losing weight – my first two years in college.

bulking up on a hearty diet of depression, self-loathing, and ramen noodles, i supplemented my own weight-loss plan with regular doses of malnutrition, dehydration, and a will to survive like that of a lemming waddling ever closer to a cliff. but i didn’t exercise, and i certainly didn’t do aerobics to oldies music. i vegetated then as now, soaking in my own juices, bathed in cathode-ray-tube beams, barely seeing the light of day. and, in all, i lost about 25 pounds in 18 months.

i’ve gained it all back, of course, in spades. i’ve gone from the steady post-pubescent spread that every man will eventually have to accept to a point where i’ve gained almost two pants sizes in less than a year and a half. it’s not that gaining weight is a problem – i expect i’ll be a chunky muffin the rest of my life, short as it probably is, it’s the rate of acquisition that’s troublesome. i started out with a nice, round buddha-like belly that my female friends felt was comforting in a teddy-bear, reminds-me-of-my-dad kind of way, to a when-are-you-due, and-what-are-you-naming-them, filling out my t-shirts and the pleats in my trousers in places i wasn’t comfortable with.

i can track all this by the belt i wear, and refuse to replace. it’s an old, worn leather strap with only a few holes in it. i can tell that a year ago, i was on the smallest hole, and was that way for a while judging by the permanent dent in the leather. since then, though, i’ve crept past one, two, three holes to where i’m holding steady now. the biggest clue, of course, is the pants i wear, or rather, don’t, because i can’t squeeze my ass into them any more. my wardrobe is dwindling because i’m too stubborn – or thrifty – to go out and buy new clothes, with the slightest chance that i might be able to still fit into the khakis i bought just a few months ago still on the horizon.

and so, i have before me my future: a package of top ramen, chicken vegetable flavor. included in this handy little shrink-wrapped noodle brick are 14 grams of fat, 1580 milligrams of sodium, 54 grams of carbohydrates, and 8 grams of protein. all told, about 380 calories. not too bad for an entire day’s sustenance, if you consider that’s two servings – not that anybody ever eats just half a brick of ramen anyway.

i can deal with that. a little malnutrition can’t hurt too much. not that i haven’t gone to some extremes before. for two weeks about 8 months ago, i fasted. didn’t eat anything, but drank lots of water and orange juice – the later only after about passing out after work one day. and i managed. not too shabby, for someone who hadn’t gone a day without a meal his entire life up to that point. will power, that’s the ticket.

so, now all that’s left is to work out the depression angle. i’m not doing too badly on that front, watching way too much tv and avoiding human contact, i think i can manage to get to the suicidal thoughts stage in a few weeks. by that point, i will have started losing some water weight through dehydration – munching on raw ramen and heightened sodium intake will do that.

note: the author wishes that you all know he is not suicidal, does not condone crash dieting or fasting to lose weight, and does not enjoy eating top ramen. he is, however, a little on the overweight side, and working on changing that.

Site Note: Speaking of regular maintenance, the site has just undergone some of its own. Along with significant code changes over the last week, today I dropped more RAM in the server, which now has triple the memory it did yesterday. What does that mean for MH? More speed, for one, since every operation doesn’t have to be paged to disk anymore…

knowing that my car, the plucky little saturn, was due for an oil change.. overdue.. past overdue.. i decided to take lunch one day last week and head to the jiffy lube for some routine maintenance, and taco bell for a quick lunch on the way back to the office.

taco bell’s bean burrito, by the way, should be classified as a drug delivery method by the FDA, and not simply a food item. whatever the bean-based goo is in there, it should be a controlled substance, prescribed by doctors as a laxative. those things are too potent to be available over-the-counter.

as i pulled into the jiffy-lube (the oil change establishment, not the taco bell) there were two cars ahead of me in line, both being worked on in the same bay. great, i thought, busy day, lunchtime, and they only have one bay running. so a technician i will refer to as gomer, who looked like nothing less than the long lost pyle brother, inquired as to the nature of my visit.

“i need an oil change”

“that it”

“yup. you only have one bay working?”

“nope. both running now.”

and so, he informed me, their crack squad of oil-soaked technicians would have me out of there in twenty minutes. leave it running. wait in the office.

and, as more lunch-breakers arrived, dropped off their cars, wandered into the office, i was smug in the knowledge that i was first in line. reading through the paltry excuse for a local paper, the even less informative and objective USA Today, and about half a dozen sports and gearhead magazines, i wondered when i would be notified my car was ready to go.

another technician came into the office, mumbling something about number seven. you number seven? seven? eventually he looked me in the eye, and asked me if i was mumble seven, at which point it dawned on me, he was asking for the driver of the saturn. me. good. i’m ready to go? not quite.

first, it was a requisite that befre they do any maintenance on my car, that i approve and see the condition of the pieces and parts mentioned. there were various pieces of metal and plastic. there was a printout. there were numbers. it was all very technical, though soaked with oil and antifreeze and thus illegible. mushmouth proceeded to tell me what exactly he recommended i pay him to do to my car.

i couldn’t understand a word of it, so i stopped him and, quite bluntly asked him to speak slowly, in english, and to enunciate so that i could understand him. honestly it sounded like he was talking around a wad of tobacco or a half-chewed sandwich. he slowed down enough for me to catch the words “flush” “radiator” “transmission” and a couple of prices, all ending in nine. i sensed he had asked me a question, but not sure exactly what.

“so you haven’t done anything to my car yet?”

“nope shir.”

“what have i been sitting in the office for twenty minutes waiting on?”

untranslatable

is it too much to ask for that people working in the services industry that need to communicate on a regular basis with customers, need to impart information, be able to do so in a manner that is understandable by the average english speaker? mushmouth’s long winded speech about the ills of my transmission was, though incomprehesible, seemed to be accurate. i don’t doubt the man’s technical savvy, nor his intelligence, only that, if he were in need of information from me, or in need of aid, that he could not have readily gotten it from me for the simple reason that i couldn’t understand two words of what he was saying.

“just do the oil change and air filter, like i asked for, and i’ll get the other stuff done somewhere else.” and i meant it. my brother’s a motorhead. i’m having him look at my car, and the oil-soaked list of recommended services, to determine just how much i should have done. i may be able to take apart and reassemble my computer blindfolded hanging upside down by my toes, but i’ll be damned if i know anything about my car’s transmission fluid or how to flush the radiator.

so, back to the office, to stand – my seat having been taken by the umpteenth lunchbreaker in line that day – for another twenty minutes, before another technician called me up to the desk to take my money and push me out the door. meanwhile, mushmouth and gomer have managed to start my car and jerkily navigate to the front parking lot, stalling it on their first attempt. they must not get a lot of manual transmissions.

for the duration of the five minute credit card transaction (since when did it cost $45 to get an oil change? maybe last time i had a coupon..) my car was left running, the door open, in the front parking lot on a busy street, teeming with foot traffic. if there are any car thieves reading this, hang out on the corner of western boulevard where the jiffy lube is. it’ll take you all of three seconds to get a car there. nice ones, too. why someone would bring the $40,000 lexus that was parked a few spots behind me in line to the jiffy-lube is beyond me.

i did finally manage to get to the taco bell, though, and for $4.44 i received two bean burritos and two hotsauce-delivery subsystems (soft tacos) and a medium drink at the drive-thru. all in less time than it took me to give, for the second time, all my name and address information to the jiffy boob behind the cash register. now that’s what i call service.

as i was leaving the irish pub i regularly attend for its weekly trivia night, i was accosted by what i can only assume was a homeless man.

the pub is in a relatively ‘good’ part of town, and is surrounded on two sides by establishments that one would normally dress up to attend, and also be sure he had enough in his checking account to cover it beforehand. the pub itself is the most authentic americanized irish pub i’ve ever been in – considering they went so far as to dismantle several real pubs in ireland and transport their pieces here for my dining and drinking pleasure (according to their menu, anyway). supposedly the irish pub is a rising trend in my area. what this means for actual, authentic pubs on the emerald isle, i have no idea, but i’ll venture that the number of drunken frat boys who frequent such establishments on this side of the atlantic will keep any number of such transplants in business for the forseeable future.

i, for one, won’t. i don’t drink anymore (something i’m trying out temporarily, knowing how much i enjoy a glass of red wine. i’ll let you know how it goes) and when i go there, i order coke, which, if you bother a bartender, and not your waiter for it, they’ll typically give you free – refills, too. that and about a $3 appetizer, which is usually shared with my table, tide me over for the whole of trivia night. i know, i’m a cheap bastard.

so, as i was leaving, walking down the well-lit street where the patrons of the aforementioned expensive establishments park, on my way to the not-so-well-lit street where I was parked, i noticed someone walking behind me. as i got into my vehicle, he came out into the light and revealed himself to be a 5’3” black man in his mid twenties with short dreadlocks, an effeminate manner, and a very soft speaking voice.

his hands were shaking uncontrollably as he tapped on my car window – a definite invasion of my personal space, but i let it slide. i am also trying to be more kind and generous to my fellow man these days. again, i’ll let you know how it turns out. i rolled down the window and turned off the radio to hear what he was saying.

homeless, vagrants, beggars, or whatever you prefer, they all have a gimmick. i have yet to meet an honest man who asked me to my face that he needed my money to buy himself another bottle of beer. i met a man once who asked me repeatedly to give him $1.79 so he could get his pregnant wife (waiting around the corner where i couldn’t see her) a quarter pounder with cheese at the nearby mcdonalds. “honest, mister, if you give me two dollars, i’ll bring you back the change.” or “a quarter to make a phone call.” i was even hit up by a little boy, no more than 12, at a loal arcade (i was playing the new gauntlet game). “give me a quarter and i’ll pay you back.”

apparently my needy one was in such a state because, despite moving here from a town 200 miles away last week, and having worked at daryl’s (a local restaurant) he was out of doors and had had his wallet was stolen which contained all his money and identification, and could i help him out so he could get something to eat.

i could have asked why he didn’t go to his place of so-called employment, only a few blocks away, to hit up the wait staff for a bite. and why he couldn’t have asked to work that night to get some extra tips. or why he had picked me, the cheap bastard, instead of some of the more well-to-do patrons across the street?

regardless of this, i sighed inwardly and decided to help out my fellow man enough to get him to go away. it’s a fact of life, or at least mine, that beggars, once they close for the kill, won’t go away until satisfied that they have inconvenienced me to the point where i will give them the change in my pocket or threatened with bodliy harm. so i rolled down the window a little further and handed him the change that was sitting in the arm rest – not a lot. a few pennies, nickels and dimes – no quarters, those all being used on parking meters this last week. less than a handful, probably less than 50 cents.

i asked if he smoked (which i don’t), and if he could use a lighter someone who did had left in my car. i gave him that, too.

then he reached into the window and asked to shake my hand.

while i was not physically threatened by the diminutive man, i shunned his gesture of gratitude, pulling my hand away from his until he withdrew. i’m not sure why, and i’m not very proud of it. paranoia, i suppose, led me to think he migh try to grab my hand and force me to open the door or some other such futile act – considering i could have pulled his arm from its socket if i had the inclination. why hadn’t he tried that when i had my fist out the window with the change? or maybe i thought he was dirty, would pass on to me some horrible homeless disease.

regardless, i gave him my change and helped him out somehow, at least he got something for his trouble. he’s a little farther along toward another bottle of beer, pack of cigarettes, or maybe a meal. i, on the other hand, traded what little karma i received from the exchange for a troubling knowledge of just how paranoid and distant i am from my fellow man. quite an education for a small handful of change.

there has been a lot of debate lately about the rising number of guns in schools. strangely, the facts of the matter are that there are fewer incidents of violence and fewer guns in schools now than there were just a few years ago – not counting, of course, the number of weapons used by security and police on campus. the lower number of guns may be attributed to the heightened security at problematic schools, which, in turn, can be attributed to the heightened publicity of the few incidents of violence in these schools, which is also increasing the public perception of violence and guns in schools. violent circle, but helpful in some ways. a little press coverage can really change a school board’s minds about public safety and the budget.

but how do we get rid of guns in schools entirely – and i don’t mean by removing those troublesome police and security officers.

first, examine who brings guns to school. boys.

when school-aged girls go gunning for one another, it is after they have exhausted their options of hair-pulling, boyfriend-stealing, backstabbing (in the gossiping, she’s-a-tramp manner, not with actual knives) and general nastiness that are typical of pubescent female conflicts. no, it’s not the girls we have to worry about, unless you take away their backstreet boys and britney spears albums.

it’s the boys. raging with testosterone, their inexperienced brain cells unable to process the information and impulses, not to mention the newfound desires, running through them like so many pennies in a fuse box. it’s hard to concentrate on school when, for the first time in their lives, they are thinking of sex on an average of six times a minute. as an adult, i’m used to it, bombarded with everything from ally mcbeal to victoria’s secret (not to mention the hordes of jailbait britney spears clones), but i remember when puberty was ramping up. these were new things, and hey, is that a dirty magazine in the bottom of dad’s closet? dripping of angst and clearasil, idle hands do the devil’s work.

which brings me to the theoretical part of my rant. bear with me, it won’t hurt. much.

okay, so where do young boys of this generation turn for entertainment, enlightenment, naked girls? duh. the internet. yes, that bastion of free thought and pay-per-view porn is the dirty magazine and cigarettes snuck behind the garage of today’s youth. it’s also where boys go to get their bomb-making plans and learn how to acquire guns – that is, of course, unless that‘s what’s lying in the bottom of daddy’s closet. smacks of another rant.

and so, i propose that, to get the guns out of the hands of today’s youth, we encourage them to put something else in them. while tardiness may increase, as more of america’s young men are caught late in the bathroom with the stall doors closed, it will certainly cut down on violence. who has time to plan and carry out a maniacal plot to kill and maim when their only thoughts are of getting back into the big box of porn? and what of teen pregnancy? also on the decline (depending on where you look) it certainly will be on the decline if more boys spent themselves into the kleenex, rather than their classmates. and there’s nothing like freely available amateur gynecology to encourage the masturbatory reflex in young men.

so, where are some of these pubescent timebombs to get online and get whacking? in the school library, of course. certainly those with computers and internet access at home are doing their, er, homework, but what of the lower-income households? how are they to reap the benefits of today’s marshal-mcluhan-meets-marilyn-manson global village? school-funded, free access in the library. and if the library has gone to the effort of installing some kind of blocking software, how are they to get to the swimsuit models and white trash hoisting their heels for the pleasure of all? banned, barred, prevented, blocked, and generally discouraged in school, good, old fashioned internet porn may be the answer.

yes, the cry goes out, more porn in schools!

okay… the nastiness is (mostly) behind us now. through some dns wrangling, people who insist on typing in ‘www’ before everything can see the sites, and should be able to get to ftp; linkexchange is up and running – though i sometimes feel like i’ve sold my soul for the occasional clickthrough (the first of which i have yet to see). that it’s owned by microsoft doesn’t help me sleep any easier.

anyhoo, on with the show, eh? real rants are coming, intermingled with the occasional tirade, real soon now.

and so is a site redesign, of this site and niftee-tron, and all the option8 family.. also (say it with me) ‘Real Soon Now’

outages are fun, aren’t they? well, this one was expected, however, it was not expected to last 2 months. server shuffling was expected to only take a few weeks, max.. bygones. anyhow, the server’s up, running, serving, doing, and being. better than i could say last month, when i didn’t know whether it would even be in town for me to plug it in.

and, so, finally, after much wrangling with internic and my isp, and some late-night dns troubles, mentalhygiene is back on the air, so to speak. all the option8 sites are up and running, just in time for the latest macaddict cdrom to come out – with the entire niftee-tron collection on it.

while i’m still working out some glitches and working up a site redesign, i also have a number of rants in the wings for those precious few people who ever actually read them. and, hell, if they’re for my enjoyment only, then fine. i’ve also got some additional guest ranters coming in – joy of joys.

there may be a change of format coming up soon, with the addition of ad banners

much to do, and as bokonon would say, busy busy busy.

sometimes i’m convinced the gods have some plan for me. i’m certain of it.

then there are times i doubt they have any idea what they’re up to, and are just as confused as the rest of us.

take, for instance, a weekend not so long ago as to be completely lost to memory. i had been invited out with a friend. i went. out, i thought, would be a good place to go, since i was visiting out of town, and why stay in when you’re already about as out as you’re going to get?

so out i go. but first, we go to pick up a friend of my friend.

friends have this way of networking, much like cloning or asexual reproduction, whereby one acquires new ones from old ones, but never actually reproduces oneself.

an interesting young lady, in the best sense of the word. interesting, in some contexts, can mean the same thing as ‘dear god, i think it moved’ or, more appropriately, ‘she has a good personality’. but, in this case, interest was piqued.

anyhow, a lovely individual, outspoken, intelligent, witty, charming, all the other stuff people are supposed to be but never are. you know the drill.

but, when, upon returning from coffee and confections, some rogue element of indigestion leaves her writhing on the floor in agony, the rest of us determined to continue on the mission of going out, i am distraught. the gods are playing tom cat to my jerry mouse, holding between overlarge, cartoon-pudgy fingers, my elastic and underappreciated tail. jerry is allowed to run only a few inches before snapping to the end of his tail’s limit, running in place while the sight gag plays out. tom releases the tail, jerry snapped in the arse like the new boy in the locker room caught without his towel.

the gods must wear sandals

some people call them flip-flops, some call them thongs. but, whenever i think ‘thong’ i think of the ass-exposing bathing suit, not footwear. so i call them flip-flops or sandals. you know the kind i’m talking about – the kind with the thingy that runs up between the big toe and the next toe. i guess that would be called the index toe, if that made any sense. it’s odd how we have names for all our fingers, but only our big toe has a name

sure, some people call the last one on the end the ‘little’ toe or the ‘pinky’ toe. but really, pinky is already taken, and ‘big’ and ‘little’ are more descriptors than names. the same, i suppose, could be said of the middle finger, but some people call it the ‘birdie’ finger, or, as stephen king put it ‘yer fuckfinger’. and what of the piggies game, where one piggy has roast beef, and one has none? i suppose we could call one ‘the roast beef toe’ and the ‘none’ toe, but that’s too cumbersome for me, and besides, it’s a matter of much disagreement which end to begin with ‘the shopping toe’ is it the big toe, or the little toe?

for the sake of tradition, let’s leave ‘big’ and ‘little’ alone. but what of the three between?

i, for one, use the big toe and the next one down for picking up and flinging things when walking barefoot. i’m probably more adept than most at this, for reasons i will explain later. the odd rock or shell on the beach, bits of laundry or trash in my apartment. so, i call that the rock-flinging toe, or just the flingin’ toe for short.

the next two toes are, somehow, inexplicably, linked. it’s an odd leftover from amphibian evolution, i suppose. they’re.. webbed. sort of like there was some brief waterfowl incident in our ancestry. makes for better swimmers, i guess. since they’re not much use alone, and i, for one, cen’t move then separately, i’ll call them, collectively, the ducktoes.

well, now that’s settled.

anyhow, on with the original topic of my rant.

i have worn sandals of the flip-flop variety – the kind with the thingy that runs up between your big toe and your flingin’ toe – for years. since i was a very small child. so my feet have an abnormal gap, hence my freakish ability to not only pick up and fling objects, but manipulate them, with my toes.

this is the effect of wearing sandals for prolonged periods of time.

so, when i examine my life, and find that the gods are doing their darnedest to come down on me with their great monty python feet, it always looks like i can find a way out in the gap between the divine big and flingin’ toes.

and so it is that i have survived so far, and not gone completely loopy. or else, maybe i’m wrong, and the black stuff between king kong’s toes actually _is_ natives.

The recent tornadoes and killing storms in oklahoma and kansas serve to remind us that it’s not just the psychotic teenagers with guns we need to be afraid of.

yes, mother nature can still kill us just as well as we can one another. after all, she’s got a lot more confirmed kills than we do. no number of gun-weilding teenage outcasts can compare to millions of years of history.

this is not to lessen the impact or the grief many of us feel about what happened at columbine high school last month, but it seems the blame and attention for the whole terrible mess has been misplaced. the media, for example, televised the memorial services (something i’ve only seen before when royalty got killed by drunken chauffers), all of which should have been personal, private moments for the families and friends of the dead. i’m not a big fan of funerals myself, as i’ve been to a few, so i get a sickened, disgusted, maggots in the meat kind of feeling even passing by one on television while scanning for something less morbid to watch.

and while i’m on the topic, exactly how many memorial services, ceremonies, gatherings, and media events do we need to have when something like this happens? i anticipate this sort of thing happening again many times in the future, seeing as we’re all a bunch of sick, depraved, trigger-happy freaks that can’t stand to see someone on television screwing up a perfectly good school shooting that we have to go out and show them how it’s done – is the latest memorial spree to be seen as a precedent? there’s been about one ceremony a day since the shootings – most of them put on for the benefit of the media, not the victims or their families. is that a precedent we want to set for the next time? i need to know, so i can plan not to watch television or listen to the radio for three weeks – or until the next natural disaster comes along.

funny how a mile wide tornado tearing through a few hundred homes and businesses, leaving nothing standing taller than a cocker spaniel, tends to put a couple of high school misfits with guns in perspective.

and the whole point of my ranting today was to talk about guns. sorry, it took longer than usual to get to the point.

people have speculated that, if guns weren’t so available, so freely acessible to buy, own, and carry, that this particular tragedy would never have happened. bullshit. my stance has always been that, yes, there are too many guns. and yes, there are too many ways for kids to get them, most often from unscrupulous adults who either don’t care what happens, or feel like it’s worth the money to look the other way.

and i count the national rifle association right up there with the klan as satan’s favorite bunch of guys.

but i must say that, if there were no guns, we’d still find a way to kill one another. i’m sure we’d blow each other to bits with bombs, or run one another down in the street with cars, or just poke each other to death with pointed sticks.

my point is this – while guns and the people who make them, distribute them, or vote down the laws to regulate them should all be set on fire, chopped into little pieces, and then pissed on – it’s not their fault that two boys took out their awkwardness on their schoolmates. no amount of press posturing by anti-gun lobbyists on daytime talk shows will change human nature. awkward, outcast, marginalized adolescents will sometimes go over the edge, and when they do, they will kill.

if these two particular nazi wannabes hadn’t been able to get hold of guns, they would have gone straight to the homemade bombs, and there wouldn’t be banners and flowers at columbine, there would be craters. big ones – did you see the plans they got from the internet?

and if there were no bomb-making materials available, they would have waited outside in the truck until people started pouring out into the parking lot.

the killing instinct and bloodlust people feel after they go over the edge that most of us never approach is unabatable. there is no denying it, to the point that, if there’s no weapon available, people will tear one another apart with their bare hands. nature made us that way, for the same reason she made tornadoes and hurricanes and wild things with sharp claws and too many teeth.

You can’t succumb to the Helsinki Syndrome if you refuse to be a victim.

I despise machines.

This might sound a little odd coming from a self proclaimed Ubergeek, but it’s true. I hate them. Leaving messages on someone’s voice mail or an answering machine makes me grit my teeth just to get through it. My heart races, palms start sweating, and after I hang up, i have to take a deep breath and let it out slowly.

The ATM is the same way. My bank has conspired against me, the closest branch not being open on Saturday. Of course, those of us with nine-to-five (or more often, eight-to-six-thirty) jobs can’t very well get to the bank during the week. So I have to use the ATM to deposit or cash checks, and check my balance over the phone.

I make a special effort to gesture at the ATM security camera in the Roman ‘Digit Impudicus’ style on the off chance that someone reviewing the tapes will get a laugh.

I hate that machines have taken over what has traditionally, and should continue to be, the realm of human beings. Before I started working, I went to the bank about once a week, and was able to walk in and, after waiting in line, talk face to face with an actual person. My money was in the hands – hands – of someone who could understand my often unusual requests, or answer my esoteric questions.

The cashiers recognized me, so that I didn’t need to dig out a card with a magnetic strip or my digitally encoded photograph on it to prove that I was who I said I was. And that’s how my money should be handled. My belief is that, since only humans place phone calls, phones should always be answered by human beings, and I should be able to talk with one when I want to ask about strange charges in my checking account.

Most of all, I hate computers.

Now, there are those who love their computers, love all the machines that they believe make their lives easier. It makes a sick sort of sense. Psychologists will tell you that after a while, hostages, even in the most horrendous of hostage situations, begin empathizing with their captors, and even fall in love with them on occasion. It’s so common that science has a name for it. It’s called Helsinki Syndrome.

Yes, computers are the kidnappers – if you let them be. If you treat your computer like a person, and forgive its faults, then you’ve submitted to its rule. Begging for a term paper that was lost in a system crash, sobbing as you try to recover a hard drive after a virus attack, you’ve fallen into the trap. They have no emotions, yet they seem to evoke the strongest ones from their users at times.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m no Luddite, bent on reversing the technology wave before it takes over our whole society. I’m an informed geek, who has seen the dark side of technology wreak havoc far too long. I don’t want you to chuck your computer out a window for misbehaving – I want you to call the manufacturer, the software vendor, the programmers that made your computer so hard to use in the first place, filled the code with bugs and incompatibilities, the ones that bound your hands with rough twine and gagged your mouth with duct tape. I want you to call them and tell them what a rotten job they’ve done, and how it is their responsibility to fix it, and not yours. Most of all, tell them it is not your place to perform ‘workarounds’ or repeated updates and reinstalls just to be able to get your work done.

What can you do? You can’t write your own software, or debug someone else’s, you can’t build your own PC from parts and solder every circuit. Well, maybe some of you can, but then, you’re not the ones I’m talking to.

If you’re the kind of geek that revels in programming, being elbow-deep in assembly code, or likes the tangle of wires and boards splayed out before you while doing some hardware hack, like some kind of electronic autopsy, then you already know how to become the master of the machine. You may have the same kind of hatred for them that I have. To be a proper master, you have to hate your slave. And now, I don’t want to get any emails about how we should liberate our computers, dammit.

There is a satisfaction that only geeks can feel – it happens when they are in control of the machinery that normally is in control of them. It’s like being in the drivers’ seat instead of riding shotgun. You pull this or that, and the machine responds. Anyone else is stuck on the other side, gripping the dashboard with white knuckles, pumping an imaginary brake pedal and screaming obscenities – hoping to survive the ride.

So what can you, the non-geek, do to stem the tide of techno-dictatorship? What you can do is be an informed consumer. Don’t buy products that aren’t well tested, that have inadequate manuals and support, that keep the end user out of the development loop. Don’t trust brand names or corporate images to bring you superior technology over the less-known competitors – the latest shiny pebble from Microsoft won’t cure your migraine headaches, no matter how much marketing they put behind it. Don’t settle for hard-to-use, user-surly, “good enough” software – even if it comes highly recommended by the corporate marketing regurgitators at the local Computers R Us.

I had a car that started causing trouble for me. Every now and then, it would stall at an intersection. The mechanics I took it to told me it was something wrong with the automatic transmission. A part was cracked and leaking. After spending half the value of the car getting it repaired, I sold the car and bought a new car – with a manual transmission.

Now, if it stalls out at an intersection, it’s due to my own incompetence (I didn’t know how to drive a manual very well before I bought it) rather than a mechanical failure. Manual transmissions have fewer moving parts and are, therefore, easier and cheaper to maintain than an automatic.

I expect parts on a car to fail every now and then, but not so often that they become unreliable transportation or dangerous to drive. I also expect parts on planes to fail every so often, but not so often that you see 727s falling out of the sky with any frequency. Physics says things like corrosion or metal fatigue, or the occasional bird getting sucked into the intakes, will happen. In the physical world, that’s what you put up with.

Electronics, however, when put together properly, and with care, should never fail. Well, not never, but on the frequency that physics tell us that the occasional cosmic wave or neutrino will knock a vital circuit out of whack, which is on the scale of millenia between failures. Systems that run UNIX or Linux have been known to have downtimes less than a few hours a year. Today’s consumer systems, those running any flavor of Windows or Macintosh OS, generally have that amount of downtime on a monthly or weekly schedule.

Downtime means wasted time. Time that the network is unreachable, the computer is down for repairs or upgrades, or just down – for no tangible reason.

Downtime sometimes comes from poorly configured, or poorly maintained systems. On the other hand, though, solid, bombproof systems shouldn’t need to be configured once they are out of the box, and should need little or no maintenance between upgrades. This is a goal that all consumer technology should aim for – to be able to switch it on, and have it work. Just work.

My stereo, refrigerator, and washer and dryer all work on almost zero maintenance. I push the right buttons, flip the right switches, and they do as they are told. Exactly like the manufacturer says they should. That’s because they have only the features they need, and no more. The designers and manufacturers know that if they put out shoddy or second rate machinery, people will refuse to buy it, no matter how low the price.

Some computer vendors should learn that, too.

Before I go on too long, I want to finish this rant with a sort of mission statement.

Don’t become another victim of Helsinki Syndrome. I’ve become accustomed to my computers not working exactly as they should, but I’m comfortable with going in and hacking them back into working order. So comfortable in fact that I have a recliner pulled up to my computer desk, and typically type with my cat in my lap.

Don’t succumb to the myth that it’s normal for technology not to work right all the time. Most of all don’t treat computers like people. They hate that.

by now everyone, or at least everyone of any importance, knows that there is a problem in a lot of computers related to the rollover of dates at the end of this century. traditional date entries of two digits will very quickly be insufficient in determining a date. the rollover of ’99 to ’00 will effect many systems relying on date information, especially in calculations involving numbers of years difference. 2000 will behave, in some instances, like 1900, showing that, for example, my mortgage payments aren’t due for another 99 years. or else that they are overdue by that amount, and 99 years’ interest has accrued.

next year, according to all accounts, will suck. hard.

january 1 will leave innumerable people without power, money, credit, food, shelter, sanitation, or drinking water. so maybe that’s an exaggeration, but there will be some serious troubles come january 1, the full bulk of which won’t be uncovered until january 3 or 4, since the 3rd is the first monday of the year 2000, and the 4th is the first day most people will be staggering back to work after the hell-raising december 31 brought. nobody does any real work on mondays anyway.

and, as the deadline, and the breadline, draw ever closer for many of us, it becomes more and more imperative that we fix all those troublesome systems that have embedded year 2000 compatibility problems.

one solution to the programming mess is the brute force method: disassembling every piece of what, in computer/dog years, is ancient code line by line and patching every date call to be able to distinguish 2000 from 1900. in many cases this requires a full rewrite of large chunks of code that is written in the computing equivalent of sanskrit: COBOL. it’s a dead tongue, so dead that those few people that still spoke or studied it were ridiculed up until a couple of years ago when everyone who was born into the age of visual BASIC and C++ realized that capitalizing on the ‘Y2K’ bug was the only way they would ever make a buck, short of selling themselves and their burgeoning software companies to microsoft.

so, trudging through the rat- and rat-eating-snake-infested swamps of twenty- and thirty year old code is the main way in which the Y2K battle is being fought. There are bugs aplenty in the aged code, few comments to guide the way, patches of one sort or another all over the place from many generations of intrepid explorers blazing their own trails into the unknown. Then, by golly, there are the undiscovered tracts of lost code, those pieces that have been misplaced, filed, burned, buried, shredded, and mutilated to the point that they need to be replaced or rewritten entirely from scratch. some such endeavors are the equivalent of rewriting the Iliad in its original dialect, based entirely on the liner notes. who has time for all this?

my proposal is a much simpler solution. so simple in fact, i’m surprised no one has thought to do it before.

we must simply convert to hex.

yes, hex. beyond the simple limiting decimal system, hexadecimal notation has sixteen digits, including those of the outdated decimal system , and including the letters A through F. to the untrained eye, hex seems mysterious and even downright spooky. you got letters in my number system! you got numbers in my letter system! in fact, the untrained, unwashed masses are so unfamiliar with hex that i have, for years, etched the combinations of lockers and other combination locks directly into the lock itself in hex with no fear of anyone being able to unlock it. how do you dial in 1D anyway?

hex is a misunderstood child of the computer age, the most a lot of people ever learn of it is as a sidenote in math classes along with venerable binary.

however, if we were to convert wholesale to hex, next year would be 199A, giving us an additional six years to get systems 2006/19A0 compliant before returning to decimal. if programmers decided to be stubborn and put off updating their code to 4 digit dates, they would have 96 more years before 1A00 rolled around. of course, if we were to convert all 4 digit dates completely to hex, next year would only be 7D0, giving us only 48 years to prepare for 800. perhaps by that point we won’t even bother to convert back to decimal.

in some systems, changing the type of number a program works with is more economical than changing the number of digits it reads. a data entry of 00 will still illicit the dreaded 1900/2000 response, marking a difference of 1792 actual years, but it remains only to train those entering data to switch to hex, and convert all 00s to 9As. it’s as simple as changing to the metric system, and we know how successful those efforts have been.