Hard, Soft and Wet. Melanie McGrath

mood and has imposed a curfew, allowing me to switch it on, but refusing to log me onto the Net so that I am effectively grounded.

      My first impulse is to contact Mac, but, since the computer has crashed, I can’t send e-mail. I take to the manual, get no further than the index. Mac’s phone number lies on my mind like aversion therapy. Best sort the thing out myself.

      So my next idea is to reach for the help button and tap in ‘HELP’. ‘This cannot be found,’ bleeps the Apple Mac. I do it again. The same message appears. Rationally speaking, I am aware that the computer either recognizes an instruction or it doesn’t. I know it can’t interpret. But this is a crisis. Why doesn’t the damned thing just do something useful? If it’s supposed to be so clever…

      I try:

      Internet

       PPP comms help TCP help Internet and so on

      Eventually I call up the company which sells me my Internet connection.

      ‘Is it a TCP error?’

      Shrug.

      ‘We’ll send you the software.’

      Go and boil your head, in other words.

      FRIDAY

      A floppy disk containing forty-two programme files arrives. No instructions. Most of the files appear to be compressed, so I have to decompress them before they can be used. But they haven’t all been compressed using the same compression software. Some are .hqx files, others .sea files, .sit files, .cpt files. Some of these I know to be self-decompressing while others require separate decompression software, which I don’t have. I can download it, but only if I can get online. And I can’t get online, because I can’t decompress the software files.