My cube neighbor is not named Alice. Actually, Alice was one of the nicknames my old [beloved] boss from umpteen gazillion years ago gave me! I’m gonna call my cube neighbor Alice from now on. It’s a better name than Cube Neighbor and it isn’t her real name but she is definitely who I call on when I am having a Windows Moment.

Actually, this is kind of a rant. I do not have Windows Moments very often. Um, do y’all even know what a Windows Moment is? Well. It is when a person who has been using Apple computers for about a brazillion years has a work laptop that uses the Windows operating system and that person is computing along dum-de-dum-de-dum and then… Hmm, where is this function on this computer? I know where it is on my trusty old mailing-taped MacBook. Where is it on Windows? Make no mistake. My work laptop is a loverly little computer and it has never failed me [knock on wood]. And I will go to great lengths, even to the Great Google, to figure out whatever it is that has me stumped before I lower myself to the point of yelling over the wall to Alice for help. Not that I have to lower myself to ask Alice. She is a wonderful colleague who has been my patient mentor since day one.

That said. Yaknow, an operating system is an operating system is an operating system. We have had Apple computers here in the Landfill since 1979. Actually, we didn’t even live here at the Landfill in 1979. I can remember an Apple II Plus sitting on top of a dresser on 209 N. Seventh St., running a random number generated probability machine. And I can remember the boys of my youth playing the Space Eggs computer game all night long. Throughout the years, I have used all kinds of computers and operating systems thereof. Several mainframes, a mini-computer, and, later on, Macintosh and what we used to call IBM-compatible computers, which ran on a command-based language. Windows came along just as I was on my last legs at that job and I went forward into the world with the Apple machines we have always had at the Landfill.

I am not afraid of any operating system. I don’t always have time in my life or my job to learn new ones but if I have to I do. But just once in a while, I’ll be sitting there in my cube and I’ll be struggling to find some obscure function on my loverly little Windows laptop and I will get to the point where I will yell over the wall to Alice for help.

Disclaimer: The image is not a political statement. Not by me, anyway. It was on a Planet Ann Arbor sidewalk near downtown. I dunno who put it there. Republican? Democrat? I could go either way on this… Have a good night and if you are near a decent beach, have a ‘hattan for Grandroobly and The Engineer or a G&T for Radical Betty. Or both!!! I won’t tell.

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