Oops, I did it again.
You’d think, after that time with the Nintendo, I’d have learned my lesson by now: when a guy says not to mess with his stuff, he means it.
When I was 15 my 12-year-old brother gave me his generous permission to play Duck Shoot on his Nintendo. I played Duck Shoot a lot, mainly for the adorable dog who would fetch your felled duck if you were skilled, or snicker at you if you missed. But then one day I took the game cartridge out before shutting off the Nintendo (or was it after? Whichever one you were not supposed to do is what I did). My punishment for this heinous crime was a two-year banishment from Nintendo. My brother, who could not remember that my mother told him five minutes ago to empty the dishwasher, enforced this punishment religiously for two years, reminding me firmly, whenever I ventured to task his memory once more, “You could have broken it, Karen!”
Then, foolishly, a mere twenty years later, I did it again. This time my uncle’s printer was my unwitting prey. Nobody in his household – not my aunt or my two young cousins – was permitted to touch my uncle’s computer. He was extremely territorial about it. He ran virus-checker software “more often than I brush my teeth” as he’ll proudly tell you. Really his fanaticism was well founded, since the other household computer, the one reserved for his kids, had so many viruses that it ran a temperature and had a sickly greenish pallor.
So it was a really big deal that I was allowed to use his computer. I was given permission to check my email only. Specifically, I was not to download anything (as if I knew how). My cousins hovered in the doorway of his study, watching me in complete awe. They were afraid to even be in the same room with their father’s computer.
I checked my email, a process with which I am confidently familiar, and needed to print one of them out. This is where my careless misjudgment comes in: I hit “print”.
The paper immediately jammed into the tightest representation of an accordion you can imagine, and lodged itself firmly within the mechanics of the printer. The printer was about eight years old – which is one thousand and twenty-two in computer years – so none of the tricks I knew to work on more modern equipment were helpful here. I was reduced to picking out pieces of shredded paper one molecule at a time with a pair of tweezers while my cousins shook with fear in the doorway, knowing that because I had busted their dad’s printer, I was probably not long for this earthly world. They liked me, and recognized the tragedy of my perishing so young.
Finally, bravely, I threw down the tweezers and informed them, “Well this is just stupid. He needs a new printer anyway.” I earned their undying respect that day, I’ll tell you.
When my uncle got home his fury was apparent. “You printed?” he asked incredulously, trying really hard to control himself since I was not one of his own kids. “You didn’t tell me you had to print!”
“I didn’t think it was that big a deal,” I whimpered. He went on to explain that his printer required extra special attention and care, what with its being geriatric. He explained how he had already had to super-glue several of its ancient parts back together, and that if you wanted to print anything, there was a gentle coaxing and tugging procedure involved which only he could perform, being so intimately familiar with it.
Buying a new printer, it seemed, was not an option. He and this printer had bonded.
I was an outcast in my own family, nearly thrown out into the cold for this horrific transgression, while we waited to see if the printer could be salvaged. My cousins treated me gingerly, as if I were on death row, but at the same time kept their distance for fear of being associated with me. Meanwhile my uncle prowled the house with tweezers and super-glue. We all waited with baited breath to see if the patient would pull through.
And then, three days later, my uncle emerged triumphantly from his study, tears of joy wetting his face. “I fixed it!” he cried. He had managed to finally remove every bit of jammed paper, and re-glued the piece that my willful printing had caused to come detached. The printer, he declared, would live.
I was saved.
But the more I thought about it, the more indignant I became. Why was I put through three days of fear and misery because of a printer that was so old it couldn’t perform its own basic function without human intervention? It wasn’t as if he couldn’t afford a new one. If it had been a dog, it would have been put down long ago. My uncle showed more affection towards that printer than he did towards most people, and when it was finally time to move on to the next grade of Nintendo I am fairly certain I saw my brother burying something in the backyard and weeping softly.
My best friend sent me a furtive email the other day: just a quick note saying she did not know when she’d be back online, if ever, because she feared she had broken her husband’s laptop, and was going into hiding.
I think about her, wonder how she is faring. I suppose I got off lucky, being merely banned from Nintendo and, now, from my uncle’s computer along with the rest of his family. My poor friend is out there cold and alone, waiting for the day she can return to her own home in safety.
I just hope she remembered to run the virus-scan before she fled.
The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do -- B. F. Skinner
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