Morning Open Thread: Pursued by The FURIES

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crossposted at flowersforsocrates.com

Recently, my computer problems have really begun to wear on me: 

Freeze-ups with that endless blue circle chasing itself, then being knocked off a site entirely.  Slow-downs that come and go for no apparent reason. The multiple log-offs and re-boots. The error messages in Tech-Urdu.  Trouble-shooting that might get me 10 minutes of uninterrupted work before the next seizure.

In Ancient Greece, the Furies, AKA Erinyes, endlessly pursued wrong-doers. Because the Greeks feared to utter the dreaded name Erinyes, the goddesses were often addressed by euphemistic names, such as Eumenides (“Kindly”) or Semnai (“August”).

“Microsoft” and “AT&T U-Verse” are the current-day euphemisms.

This is an old joke — I first saw it around 2005, and it wasn’t new then. 

At a recent computer expo, Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, "If GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."

In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating:

If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.

2. Every time they repainted the road lines, you’d have to buy a new car. 3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this. 4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine. 5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive -- but would run on only five percent of the roads. 6. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation" warning light. 7. The airbag system would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying. 8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna. 9. Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again, because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.

10. You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off.

— from 2009 post at www.techspot.com/...

2009 Comment at techspot by hewybo:

“The only thing GM forgot to mention was that you would have to pay $35* per service call, only to be told that you must RE-PURCHASE THE SAME CAR before being allowed to start it back up. And that the mechanics are unavailable, so please check with the twelve-year-olds down the street. Maybe they can fix it.”

*In 2016 dollars, that would now be about $43 for a service call — but the rates here in Los Angeles are way higher than that — and today, the kids down the street are 8-year-olds.

If I didn’t have my own live-in tech guy, I wouldn’t be on-line at all.

OK, OK, so I’ve called Bill Gates the Anti-Christ and AT&T the star-spawn of Cthulhu — was that so bad that I deserve to be driven mad?

Surely other people must have called them worse things.

Visuals Detail from Orestes Pursued By The Furies by John Singer Sergeant The Appsboard of a QNX automobile

Footnote: While I was writing this, the computer slowed down, froze up once, and then it took three tries and one log-off to load the John Singer Sergeant artwork. Actually, a slightly better-than-average morning.

Then there’s DK5 — sigh.