DenisHorgan.com

The computer croaked on me. RIP, computer.

So I got a new one, with it’s scores of jacks and miles of wires and gadgets everywhere. Whistling up my sons, I got the thousands of pieces assembled.

But, oops, I do not have Microsoft Word, rather essential to what I do. Word being words to me, and all. So the crooks make me buy what ought to be a pretty much a give-away element of a word processor: Words. I get mahjong games for free but not words. I have to pay extra for the oxygen I breathe. But I have been bilked by better than Microsoft so I begrudge them the small fortune it takes to get Words — bundled into an expensive package of other programs I will never use in my entire life. OK.

Except I cannot open the package.

It is a neat plastic box, very pretty with a deftly smoothed corner on the periphery, a snowslope smoothness on another side. It’s a marvel to behold. But it cannot be opened. There is a slight paper tag which comes off when you pull it, sealing the thing even further in the fashion of what you hope will be the seal on radioactive chemicals dumped in the sea. There are what appear to be hinges but which do not hinge anything to open, or close. There are tabs that will break off your fingernails rather than come apart to reveal the treasures within. There are things that might be squeezed if you have fingers like pliers, and others that seem to offer the chance to twist away with a screwdriver — although your belly button seems to offer that chance, too, and, as you know, that doesn’t work.

I cannot get into the box to get at my … well, I don’t know what’s in it. If submarines were made like this, they’d never sink. The spaceshots would travel through eternity if they were sealed like this thing. I’d take a hammer to it except that I’d surely break what’s in it. Surely more engineering and packaging — infernal packaging — went into this box than the secrets inside.

The label advises me I must accept the enclosed license terms before I can use this software. But I cannot get to the enclosed license terms nevermind the software. It alerts me: The example events depicted herein are fictitious and no association or connection therewith is intended or should be inferred. What? I cannot get “herein.”

Somewhere, in Washington state or China or where ever these things are sealed like the Pharoah’s sarcophagus, they’re laughing at me.

SOS