A "Dear John" to my old Sony Vaio mouse.

The BBQ Pit
1

Dear Sony Vaio 5.0 trackball,

In a myriad little ways, you always did your best to make my life a misery. You were a tad too obtrusive – a little too fat and too high for my palm, and long periods of use would leave me feeling a tad sore. Also, your scroll wheel was too prominent a feature for my comfort, demanding inintended brushes from my… (I blush) …middle finger. Your connecting cord was too fat and stiff for unforced maneuvering on my small desk surface; your trackball and contacts, unreliable. And then, about three months ago, you opened your diabolical bag of tricks: stuttering, carooming wildly over and off the screen, and freezing on me entirely, usually when I was in the middle of an app, but increasingly from the boot-up.

I thought I could live with your peccadilloes. I was embarrasingly young and naive – and in any event, I’d never had such problems with a mouse before. Examining your plug-end, I realized that I didn’t even know the term for your prong configuration. The prospect of replacing you with another seemed beyond my ken.

Finally, though, about a year ago, I decided to take the plunge and accept the solicitations of a state-of-the-art Logitech wireless optical mouse. To my horror and dismay, that affair was doomed to remain unconsummated: Madame Vaio coldly rejected your sleek superior as “Not Compatible”. She didn’t even permit me to download his install program!

Rather sheepishly, I returned to your rather clumsy ministrations. Mme. Vaio shot me no more error messages, and I hoped that the whole awkward affair would blow over.

But you were not the kind to forgive and forget, were you? Your moodiness only worsened over time, morphing into outright hostility. You went beyond mere occasional balkiness and began shutting down on me entirely, forcing me to re-boot your mother on numerous occasions. What did I ever do to you, since my brief encounter with the Logitech unit, to provoke this transformation? You wouldn’t say, and the formidable Mme. Vaio offered me no clues, even though the multiple re-boots were obviously straining her patience.

Granted, I had inadvertently pulled you off my desk a few times – my knee or stockinged foot catching your cord – and you suffered a few ungainly landings on the kitchen linoleum. But didn’t I apologize to you, and express great care and concern, and even curse the gods each time I committed this… foible? These acrobatic flights didn’t measure up to your normal-use protocols, admittedly, but the fact that you continued to function after each one of your pratfalls convinces me that it was not my clumsiness that broke your spirit, but your own flawed manufacture, your engineering, your mother’s programming, or a combination of these.

Now panicky, I did everything I could think of to placate your mother and you – deleting games I never play and a large cache of cookie files I stumbled over. Nothing helped, and you remained as sullen as ever.

And so I have at last moved on. I’ve taken up with a mini-GE optical unit, very sleek and seemingly designed to fit in the palm of my hand. No more trackball, no more unintended scrolling, and no more fits of your erratic behavior and passive-aggressive shutdowns.

I’m free of you at last. As far as I’m concerned, you’re just Friday’s trash. And this not-so-savvy cybergirl has a new best friend.

2

Top-grade rant!

3

I must say, that rant was downright sexy.

4

Hey, it’s Sony. Of COURSE it’s crap. What did you expect?

5

Thanks for the kudos.

htns, I thought the whole Sony thing would be great insurance. My top considerations were reliability, user-friendliness, and enough computing power to handle the next few years’ worth of increasingly complex games.

My previous computer was a Proteva – a no-name IBM clone. It actually served me well for several years before it became obsolete and unable to handle the latest games.

Prior to that was my first computer, an IBM with Windows preloaded. It worked o.k., most of the time, but it had the alarming habit of me throwing glitches when I was racing to finish term papers.

Prior to that, by a number of years, was our family’s Commodore 64. (I don’t know of any novelist or filmmaker who has yet done justice to the sheer absurdity of a signal middle-class spectacle of the very early 1980’s – the family breathlessly clustered around the Commodore 64, struggling to play through a text-only game, alternately marvelling at the state-of-the-art tech revolution in their den and stiffling their growing sense of disappointment and frustration with its limitations and breakdowns…)

Not one of these systems has worked flawlessly, although I would point the finger more at the software apps (i.e., Windows) than the hardware, overall. But each step has been a real advance over its predecessor, and I try to keep a positive outlook while surfing this wave of technology.

And after all that, to be tripped up by a mere mouse? Ridiculous!

6

So, you’re admitting then that it was you all along, eh? And here you are, trying to place the blame on this poor, poor, innocent hardware. For shame! :stuck_out_tongue: :stuck_out_tongue:

7

Busted. “…throwing glitches at me” would’ve been a lot better.

The scariest 1980’s IBM/Windows glitch was this weird black blob – like a section of selected text run wild – that would drift, shape-shift, and grow on my documents. It was unresponsive to mouseclicks and cursor keys, so I’d have no choice but to reboot.