Have you ever had one of those days when you want to just pick your computer up off the desk and chuck it at the wall as hard as you can, like that time when you broke your phone by doing exactly the same act after hearing that your (ex)-girlfriend had run off with your older, more attractive cousin that she met at Aunt Mildred’s wedding last summer?

Or maybe you’d prefer to take your laptop and place it squarely in the center of the road in front of your house on a Tuesday or alternating Saturday where it would get ran over by the garbage truck promptly at 5:45am, like that time when the kids left their bikes out in the road after you clearly told them to put them away before coming in for their baths, but they didn’t listen because they tend to have selective hearing unless you happen to be talking about Hannah Montana or The Suite Life with Zack & Cody?

Hey, it was a late night and the remote stumbled onto The Disney Channel … don’t judge me!

Whatever your preferred method of revenge by destruction may be, I can certainly relate this week because, well, let’s just say that my computer and I aren’t exactly getting along all too well at the moment. And not so much in that it doesn’t write to me as much as it used to or it keeps leaving dirty dishes all over the house, but more along the lines of it won’t even turn on anymore.

I don’t ask for a whole lot from a computer, but on is definitely one of my prerequisites!

And it’s tough because here I’m supposed to be the resident computer geek, but I’ll be frank in that I really don’t have the foggiest idea of what could possibly be wrong with the giant paperweight. I’ve checked connections, swapped out hardware, reconfigured the flux capacitor to operate at its optimal 1.21 gigawatts, but no – nothing seems to work. I even tried just kicking the thing across the room in hopes of settling the bits or some nonsense, but all that got me was a dent in the computer’s case and a sore foot…

So I ask the eternal question of the hour – really, what’s a computer geek to do when he needs help with his computer?! It’s one thing to be stuck being the computer guy in the family who gets 9:00pm calls from random family members asking how to get the printer working again or remove those sites from their web browser’s history before the wife gets home, but I don’t exactly have an uber computer guy who somebody like me can call when the tech manages to baffle even the likes of me!

* Cut to a middle-aged guy living in his parents’ basement, which has by now been converted into his super secret geek cave where he can wallow in motherboards and Cheetos in between reruns of Mystery Science Theater 3000… *

Sadly, after several pain-filled, sleepless nights, I’m remorsefully coming to terms with the idea that it may very well be time to just put Old Bessie down and find myself a newer, faster computing machine that actually has a will to live. Believe you me, it’s certainly not an easy decision to come to, but honestly, I can only scribble out so many of these columns in crayon on brown paper bags before I’m going to have officially ran out my welcome with the company secretary and her vastly superior transcription skills!

They say that a geek never forgets a computer, similar to how mothers never forget the names of their children, and I know that deep inside there will always be a place in my heart for the PC that has seen me through hundreds of columns and infinitesimally more amounts of questionable Internet content throughout the years. I can only hope that my next computer lives up to expectations left by its predecessor, before it got all sickly and pathetic, anyways.

Rest in peace, my faithful computing steed. If I hear of anyone who’s looking for a good doorstop, I’ll be sure to put in a good word for you…