Maxigumee

Uh…kay. What has happened in this last week that I have not updated? Well. We had some computer problems. All fixed now. At least for the most part. But, man. While they were going on, it was like this house was about to explode. About a week or two ago, our internet on our airport network started going reeeeally slow. Not just like, dialup slow. No, it was excruciating takes-ten-minutes-to-load-every-page and please-tear-my-head-off slow. No joke- it took GOOGLE forever to load. That, my friend, is slow internet.

I tried thinking of reasons as to why the internet was fast on the computer attached to the modem and I-will-give-you-my-leg-if-you-can-make-the-internet-faster slow on the computers getting the internet from that computer. I tried reorganizing my father’s desktop and making it all neat and pretty. I picked out a new desktop for him and created custom folders and icons categorized for all of his file folder needs. He hated the change of course. He likes his desktop messy and frustrating, thank you. It didn’t help, anyhow.

I chatted around with some online people and some suggested to install the new operating system, Tiger, onto my father’s computer. We had bought the family pack for Tiger when it came out, so it was no problem to go and install it. Except that my father is totally anal and DO NOT TOUCH MY STUFF about his computer and was also under the impression that installing anything new would erase all of his files immediately.

And this is where we both should win the award for miscommunication. I was looking at the box for Tiger and I was like, “oh, wait, Dad. We can’t install this on your computer anyway. You don’t have enough RAM or whatever.” So my father went and bought tons of new RAM whatsits for his computer. I took this as him being alright with me installing Tiger. So I did. And the internet seemed to work. For a short time at least.

But then. That’s when the other, even more stressful problem started. The problem with my father’s printer. The problem that had me on the internet in various completely unhelpful apple chat rooms trying to find out why on earth my father’s printer wasn’t working. “You tell it to print and then it opens the printer application and then it just DOES NOTHING,” I complained hysterically to several people. All were stumped.

My father in the meantime was going ballistic. He needed his printer to work desperately so that he could print out things for his political campaign. “It’s Tiger. I know it is. You installed Tiger on my computer EVEN when I told you NOT TO and now the printer is broken.” I tried to restrain myself from going all Lizzy Borden on him and explained that it was a printer problem. It couldn’t be Tiger doing it. He commanded me to remove Tiger from his computer and to revert to the previous operating system, Panther. I told him that that would be quite hard unless we backed everything up and erased everything from his computer and then reinstalled from scratch. I also told him that putting Panther back on probably wouldn’t fix the printer problem at all. He didn’t seem to be listening. “JUST DO IT.”

I was not going to do it. It was one of those moments when you are absolutely certain that you are RIGHT. In a very desperate moment, when my father had thrown his printer-troubled eMac out of his office and brought home the one from his office, I had a stroke of genius. I searched for the HP Laserjet printer preferences and found that they were not in the preferences folder, but in some other folder called “Old Prefs.” Apparently, when my father had brought his computer to the Apple Genius Bar at the Apple Store, they had moved all of his old preferences to a folder on his desktop. So it all goes back to me organizing his insanely messy desktop into five, neat, categorized folders. And the printer worked. So BOO-YAH. I was right.