revised expectations

i like to think that for the past five years
or so
i've done a good job of telling the
mac zealot
inside of me
to shut the fuck up
because no one likes him

but sometimes when he's right he can be
pretty insistent and feels that he must be heard

so

as i wait for solidworks to get back to work
after a surprise bsod

let me tell you a story
about me
our it guy
and two computers

once upon a time i had my pc at work nicely adapted to my style of work
two monitors
google chrome
object dock
all made my life better
excepting the fact that the thing was just so damn slow at solidworks
even simple models couldn't spin pan zoom without big hiccups
where it maxed the cpu
hit the hard disk
and the video card was doing who the hell knows what
considering the other evidence

so i made the mistake of swearing at it one day
in earshot of our it guy
who suffers from a surfeit of single-minded helpfulness

so he went after my machine a bit

i went after it a bit

i discovered that the second monitor was causing the video card to choke
he removed google everything
because he's convinced they're the root of all problems
and that hard disks must be kept no more than one-third full
and that somehow this affects solidworks performance

the solution
"i'm going to delete x y and z"
not for the first time

i strenuously argued
"i use those every single day"
"..."

in the end it turned out that the system was still configured
for some strange things
from a previous user
and it had nothing to do with a [not] full hard disk
my dock program
or google chrome

but tired of arguing about just why it lets me down
why it's slow
why there are days when programs die
one by one
why it needs to update everything every day

i just stopped
all the stuff i asked it to do
it did badly
grudgingly

i stopped using my work pc for anything but
pro/e and solidworks
and it's mostly done all right

but it can't handle that and word
or excel
or powerpoint
and it sure as shit can't handle a web browser
which
is as important for work these days
as it is for slack

so all that's done on my mac now
my own laptop
sitting next to the big clunky pc

running office and photoshop and mail and innumerable safari windows
while playing my robot music

and it hasn't been rebooted in a month

to tweak apple's commercials' characters to my situation
let's say my macbook is kevin youkilis
versatile and dependable with surprising power

which would make my pc
the equivalent of the sweatpants guy trolling for free food at the newton taco bell
last night
or as some call him
jason giambi

[i can't prove that]