Married to my computer

I promised to love and honor my husband, to care for him in sickness and in health. But as soon as my computer came down with a virus, I abandoned my husband for my PC. After all, Gary can take care of himself. But if I don't clean and disinfect my Windows, who will?

As it turns out, it was a pretty serious bug that bit my computer. Kind of like pneumonia. Well, more like SARS, really. It came on suddenly and spread quickly and quietly.

After spending hours on the phone with the IT staff at work, trading e-mails with a programmer, and talking with two young technology turks, I had rid my machine of its symptoms, but the mysterious cause was still making it behave erratically.

By the time I had re-installed virus software, cleaned out my cache, and downloaded all possible browser updates, I wanted someone to pull the plug on me.

I felt like my very life force had been disconnected.

I count on my computer to access e-mail from friends and family, to connect me to news and information sources, and to enable me to work remotely.

But it's really my hard drive for knowledge that has turned a marriage of convenience into something deeper. I am addicted to access -- to the encyclopedic world at my fingertips, embodied by Google, with its reliability and its curious blend of predictability and serendipity.

I am also in love with the simplicity of the relationship. My computer says itch, and I scratch. I tell it where I want to go and it takes me there.

But you learn things about relationships at moments like this, and I now know my machine was programmed with a temper and uses inflammatory language when pushed too far -- Does it really need to ask me if I want to abort?

If I am to recover from this abusive relationship that eats up too much of my time and money, I must accept that I am powerless and turn myself over to a higher power. Higher than Bill Gates, even.

It's time to take inventory and make a list of all I've harmed. It's bad enough that I have virtually left my husband. But my addiction has also turned my son into an Internet orphan.

Even worse, I have become his enabler, a dealer for this electronic narcotic.

A recently released study shows that kids who are six years old and younger spend two hours a day engaged in screen time. That's time in front of a computer, video game, or television.

As soon as I saw these study results, I called home. My son answered and I asked him how long he thought he'd spent watching TV that day. He said, "Five hours."

He is 7, and technically older than the study participants, and he was estimating -- rounding up, I'm sure. But still.

I asked if he'd spent two hours outside (as the 0-6-year-olds in the study did, on average). He said, "No." He paused. "It was raining, though."

I'm thinking of buying him an exercise bicycle.

Meanwhile, I’ll take it one day at a time and try to spread the word.

If you're like me, here are two steps you can take today.

First, is your computer always on? If it is, turn it off. That will at least delay the inevitable.

Second, later, while you're impatiently waiting for it to boot up, spend a few minutes searching your brain's RAM for error messages -– things you've said and done that just don't compute. When you find one, delete it from your behavioral database.

In the end, this trial separation could be the password you're looking for -- the one that accesses those connections you truly cannot recover once they're lost.

A slightly different version of this LifeFiles column originally appeared on about 70 TV station websites managed by Internet Broadcasting Systems.

Comments

[Shelley]

Hilarious!

[Kelly]

Good Lord. I'm an addict. I'm a user. My computer only gets turned off when I go to bed. I run in to check things between dinner and the dishes. My crafts sit idly collecting dust, my children flutter between being a distraction and an annoyance when I'm in front of my trust imac, unless I can somehow find a way to include them. I don't have tv to watch so I've justified it, and why pay for high speed access if I'm not going to use it. I have so much research to do to BEGIN my writing career. Yet all I've written is posted on two blogs. OH LORD I'm an addict. Excuse me while I go into denial here so I can at least finish my morning reads and write a couple of short posts. You'll see one in your inbox shortly...