Ok, so here’s a change of tone... There are many of us that should own a computer... And then there are people like Alan.

Now Alan is a simple man, and I mean that in the most respectful way. Of course Alan is not his real name, his real name is Willy Wonka, but I will refer to him as Alan because I wish to protect his identity, as one should. So, Alan bought a nice neat little computer from us about a week ago. Everything was fine up until he left the store with his new PC... It was from that moment that it became apparent that we would regret ever having met the man.

Well Alan took approximately three hours to transform his new look Windows XP toting office machine into a binary ship wreck. God only knows what he had done to the thing. It wouldn’t even boot up anymore. Sure It still looked like a PC, but it behaved more like a toaster, except not quite as reliable.
Now to learn how to use a PC, one should assume that apart from the obvious advantage of owning a computer, one may also deduce that the use of one’s brain (and a little confidence) may also be advantageous, am I right? Well, the world according to Alan is a very different place. Not unlike Willy Wonka’s Chocolate factory, things are not as they first may seem. You see, just like Willy’s chocolate factory, (except with all those chocolate sweets coated in methamphetamine; instead of the lovely brown sweet stuff) the world according to Alan is a very complicated place, filled with extraordinarily difficult to comprehend sights and new tactile experiences...Like Windows for example, and the foreign concept of a recycling bin that lives in your computer.
To Alan, it is strange that there is no Wednesday morning garbage truck that takes it away and the fact that he can recycle things ‘forever’ means that he can and should recycle something on a daily basis as part of his global responsibility to keep the internet clean and free of rubbish. Such a noble cause should be commended and Alan is to be thanked by the oompa-loompas for his role in such a mammoth task.
Alan’s choice of computer was largely based on its ROHS certification... The new global initiative to reduce the amount of heavy metals and other hazardous substances in computerised components such as the motherboard inside his new ‘green’PC. Choosing an optical mouse was important to Alan as he had to be sure that it did not contain a rubber ball that could wear out over time and end up as land fill. He made certain that all desktop icons were kept to a minimum to reduce the amount of space his PC took up on his environmentally friendly LCD monitor. Low radiation means fewer black balloons people... Congestion on the internet is of course a thing that Alan is deeply concerned about. That’s why he opted for dial up technology. Less time on the internet means fewer ballons people, see the pattern? So anyway, back to the story. Alan had his PC restored to it’s original factory condition. Four hours later, Alan called for technical support...
He had run out of things to put into the recycling bin, so resorted to system files that he could not make any sense of. They just seemed like ’jibberish’ to Alan. He decided in his wisdom, to load an old version of Kodak Easy Share software, in the presumptuous mood he was in, with the idea of actually connecting a digital camera (if he ever got one). Who knows where the software came from, but as soon as we got wind of this, we thought the worst. Holly crappers, not the ‘Kodak Easy Shaft’ software Alan!!! Cries of Noooooo, Noooo, No were heard in the vicinity of Phil’s desk. And the stories of system file relocation to the recycle bin attracted a similar response.
Phil dived frantically for the phone as if it were a life buoy that would somehow save Alan from his ultimate nightmare...

As it turns out, It would become ours.

To be Continued...