Monday, January 11, 2016

The Old Machine

1st February 2015

Dear Cassi,
       
I recall I once told you of my first computer. I cannot recall if I mentioned the events leading up to the fail of my word processor which was an old silver gray thing with a blocky body. In short it broke and needed fixing in length it wasn’t worth keeping around, but an important part of this was my depression.
       
It took me forever to do anything at the age of fourteen. I could hardly lift my hands to type and so it would take me all day to write anything. A great question is ‘why I lived my life as a cold sack of meat?’ and I haven’t any real answer. One possibility is that I had a vitamin deficiency, another that I was just depressed, but the question is irrelevant now.
       
There was an assignment over the summer, the first assignment of high school English, to read ‘Great Expectations’ by Charles Dickens and then pick out quotes to talk about in a paper. I remember having to build a fort of books to get this done. I couldn’t lift my hands far enough to type and so made a structure that would permit my hands to rest on the keyboard while I was lying down.
       
Now the old word processor was a hand me down from my two older siblings and it should have been a few years past its life expectancy. It didn’t take well to my slow workings and all that time running and conked out.
       
My homework was trapped on the proprietary file format of that old contraption, and we had to get if fixed. I did try showing my teacher the disk and having him try to open it, but that proved fruitless. We had the machine repaired, and I got my work turned in but the word processor failed a second time.
       
It was at this point I pushed for a computer and got Alan’s normal response ‘now is a bad time, there’s too many new things coming out.’ I looked at him and said ‘there are always new things coming out’. In a week I had a computer.
       
As an odd note, he took the word processor to be used by my step siblings and I never saw it again. Good riddance, they had a computer but it was rather old and, as I recall, had no hard drive.

Never fear change, little sister,




Richard Leland Neal

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