All those years I spent in high school, wondering about what it felt like as I sat disaffectedly smoking cigarette after cigarette at Denny’s, peering out under a mess of black hair pomaded with shoe polish, and drinking coffee after nine p.m. (!), my my my. Now I know how it feels to be one of the many morons who walk among us, like the ones I stared at derisively so many years ago. Frankly, it’s shocking that I’m typing this at all and not just bashing my head against the keyboard and drooling.

So, you may recall that Hester Prynne’s hard drive cacked it around Thanksgiving. Well well well, some of my most special internet bitches pooled and sent my broke ass a new one for Xmas, completely unprovoked. I’d link them, but we probably have the kind of relationship where we make out in secret, and then when the rest of the football team is there they call me a ho and snap my bra strap.

Since then I’ve been wrasslin with old Hester Prynne. The following reenactment, which is not suitable for viewing by minors, has taken place over several days when I’ve been not at work and, um, sober (mostly). The HD installed smoovely and beautifully. It gapes with space that is aching to be filled with poor attempts at Barney Miller slash and photoshops of Hayden Pantymare. AHA, I said. I popped in the internet start up diskgummy in a jolly fashion. I was seconds away from mongoose porn!

BUT NO. I was SO SO SO far away. Hester Prynne did not come with a Vista disk. No, srs. She didn’t. I didn’t care or even notice at the time, really. Meh. Plug n’ play, etc etc GO. Oh, but what’s this? I had a copy of XP that seemed to be…from the Enlightenment? Feeling like Professor Peabody, I carefully fed the crumbling scroll into the data receptacle and watched Hester try to grok it. “Oh, verily my master can I play yew this cunninge versionne of an Oh Ess.”

Uh oh. Can you get on the Internet?

“Ho ho, ha ha, what is Internet? I hail from a time before service packs. Forsoothly it doth proclaim that this XP scroll dates back to Ye Olde Dell of Yore, that did barely play Sims 1.”

“GOD, that sucked. I could barely play Michael Bachelor’s house.”

SHIT. No updated drivers, no nothing. No way to get onto the internets. I went to suck some service packs off the web, which is a huge pain in ass involving things like READING FOR COMPREHENSION and patience while 300 GIANT MBs download onto the Abacustop. (Abacustop, feeling left out: “Aye think aye kin run ye Sim Ant.” Me: “FUCK YOU. You can’t run fucking Minesweeper.”)

Step 4,000: Mooch a flash drive that is bigger than half a page in Word, which is all I seem to own (what is UP with that?). Put SP files on flash drive and jam it into Hester’s port. WHAT’S THIS? You don’t even SEE the flash drive? I can’t even MANUALLY ASSIGN IT A LETTER? At this point a nerd comes to help me with some fucking DOS commands to make other drives BEE-HAVE, accidentally gives Unix commands (“Which are totally, like, pretty similar”), watch Unix commands fail, break for call sign and swearing, hear treatise on superiority of Unix, and FAIL.

Step 12 Kerjillion: Burn files to disk. This is where the stupid really kicks in. Go downstairs Where Such Things Are Kept, rootle, find a big disk, assault Abacustop’s drive with it.

What are the odds SJ brought up the wrong disk? HMM? Bonus points if you calculate them to the nearest decimal and turn water into wine and give it to ME.

AHH! Smartening up now. She brought up TWO disks of the correct type in case there is some kind of fail with the first one, because there will be. Copy SPs to disk. Jam disk into Hester, click quickly on…is this SP2? It must be, because the other is SP3.

Anddd NO. Thank you for playing. SJ copied the start up file for…Windows Movie Maker? Because that looks totally like SP2? Ah well. I can at least move SP3ANNNNND BIG RED STOP SIGN FILE CORRUPT.

I thought typing this would make me feel better, but it’s actually giving me a bigger headache. I left some stuff out, but it’s pretty much been two weeks of this. I sort of feel like if you asked me my age right now I would start stamping my hoof in reply.

In Other, Non-Fail News

My friend Shauna is going to be on the Early Show on Friday pimping her book! EEEEEEE!