A Lifetime Spent In The Outdoors

A lifetime spent in the outdoors hardly prepares me or most people for balky computers that puke out on a moment's notice.

Frankly, being down for more than a week from producing my daily weblogs is much like having an itch you can't scratch in public. It slowly begins to grate on one's nerves, causing normally sane people to break out Old Betsey, their trusty 30-30, and drill a few rounds through what appears to be a smirking blank screen.

Mechanical things vex me

Mind you, my idea of causes for bad humor are commonly associated with recalitrant things like husky outdoor motors that won't start. It occurs when a reel is dropped, gears get knocked a'kilter, or when your sure as death-and-taxes bird dog suddenly decides he is the village idiot, galloping at full speed through quail covers or past a solitary ruffed grouse hunkered down in the bracken ferns. The bird explodes from cover as the dog spooks it 100 yards out of shotgun range.

It appeared to be a simple fix to get this thing  back up and running. Simple, that is, if you know more about computers than I do. My idea of perfection on the computer is when my copy flows effortlessly across the screen, poke a few keys and as if by magic, my story appears for one and all to read. No problems, no headache, no naughty words, no problems.

Cures for computer problems

But, finding a cure for what ailed my computer for the past week was far beyond my mental acuity. I couldn't do anything except sit with a snarl on my face and continue to tell myself that I dasn't follow my primal urges. You see, my basic philosophy about mechanical things that don't work is rather simple: If a ball-peen hammer and a few solid swings doesn't do the job, try a 12-pound sledge hammer. A friend of my uses his lazy good-for-nothing computer as a means of sighting in his .308 at 100 yards.

It's a rather impressive sight to see what had been a cantankerous but wonderful laptop computer with three .30-caliber bullet holes through the screen. It seems only fitting for a hunter to take out all of his pent-up anger, animosity and rage on the cause of his problems. However, such drastic measures do nothing but put more money in the pocket of the local computer salesman.

I have no need for an anger management class. I can keep my savage thoughts in check. A call to my favorite web guy should do the trick. Ah-ha, he's gone for a week to a retreat. That's fine, they both deserve to get away but what about my computer. That's easy. I do nothing about it.

Go bow hunting

It's times like this when it may be more worthwhile to climb up into a ladder stand and hunt deer. Oh no, it's another spate of east winds, which is the worst hunting wind in my area. I can't find a stand with protection against the dreaded east wind ... except one. And my wife is sitting in it, proving she's smarter than me.

So, after a frustrating week the site is back up and running. I tend to be optimistic about everything in life, including my knowledge of deer hunting, but when it comes to computers and the quick fixes that make them work, I am the eternal pessimist. My glass is half empty because my usual fumble-fingered treatment of my computer usually means the other half of that glass of water will soon be knocked over into the keyboard.

That's my kind of luck.

A Lifetime Spent In The Outdoors ((tags: balky computers, deer hunting, hammer, ladder stand, snarl))

Posted via email from Dave Richey Outdoors