I sit here with a box next to my desk that contains my new combination fax/scanner/printer. It’s main purpose is to replace an 11 year old fax machine that sits at my desk and groans and creaks like a bridge about to give way every time it prints a fax. The noise is so loud I have to leave the room if I’m on the phone. So why haven’t I taken it out of its box and set it up yet? I’ll tell you why. Because, kids, back in the day before you were a zygote in your mother’s womb, connecting new devices to your computer involved more cable than were originally laid to connect Europe and America by telegraph; more connecting devices of more variety than it now takes to hook up every telephone in Manhattan and more ingenuity and knowledge than it takes for a space flight. When you were done, if you were lucky and actually got all the thingamabobs connected correctly to all the thingamajigs, the back of your desk looked like the most unappetizing bowl of spaghetti ever. And don’t even get me going about the horror of unhooking everything if you had to take your computer to the doctor for its check up. Seems like no matter how much you labeled each wire and color coded the label to the orifice it should be returned to, when your computer finally came home it always seemed to have gained or lost an orifice, thus leaving you with one extra connection with no place to go or one extra orifice that was begging for something to be plugged into it if you ever wanted your computer to work again.
And it is because of those traumas that my new device will probably sit by my side for many days to come until someone who is probably about ten years old shows up to connect it.