AKA – “The Day Our Worlds Stood Still… (for a couple hours)”

Dateline: Afternoon of Tuesday, June 10, 2025

While my sister and great-niece were enjoying their birthdays down at Silver Dollar City, the foundations of our world were quaking and crumbling, causing them to teeter on the brink of destruction. OK, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration. Even though our experiences weren’t as traumatic as the catastrophic events depicted in that “classic” 1951 Sci-Fi thriller, the whole afternoon was still kinduva heavy bummer.

This is what happened:
I said recently how I use my computer pretty much all day, every day. I told Jen that it’s my second-best friend in the whole world. I probably meant it too (just kidding). I do heavily rely on it for almost everything I do, though. It’s practically an extension of me, like having a third arm, but this one usually works.

The day was starting off pretty good. Jen was getting ready to go run a couple errands (her mom came over to sit with me and call 911 if the house caught on fire) and I was anxiously awaiting sitting out on the deck and watching a couple episodes of my show. There might have been 1 or 2 fair-weather clouds in the sky, the temperature was perfect (82°, my favorite), very low humidity and a slight breeze. What could possibly go wrong on a day like today? BTW, the show I’m watching right now is Succession; I’m on Season 1. People have been talking about it for years, but I wouldn’t pull the trigger on it for whatever reason, until now. They were right too, once you get past all the backstabbing, betrayals and underhanded attempts to upend each others’ lives, it is a really good show. Think of the most dysfunctional family you know. This family will make them look like The Waltons.

Well, much to our chagrin, neither of those things happened. Instead, the special software (EZKeys) that I use to communicate, type, interact with my computer, etc., started to act all wonky in a weird way I had never seen before. I could barely get it to do anything. Then, to make matters a lot worse, my actual computer itself (Windows 10) started losing its mind and going belly-up. Any time I could coerce my mouse arrow to hover over a document’s icon so I could double click on it to open it up, it would delete it! Thank God for the Recycle Bin – Windows doesn’t really delete stuff when you tell it to DELETE something, it just moves it here in case you inadvertently delete something you actually wanna keep.

So anyway, we heard: Rrrrr! <record-scratch>! – and our fun-packed afternoons took hard lefts and screeched to a halt. I was pretty much dead in the water and Jen didn’t leave me hanging. We got on the phone with the technical support person for EZKeys. He’s a great guy; we’ve worked with him many times over the years. He’s always willing to go beyond the scope of just supporting EZKeys and helping us with ANY (usually Windows) computer problems. So, he dialed in remotely and assumed control of my computer. That always freaks me out a little when he does that, I just sit there twiddling my thumbs, watching my mouse arrow move around and my computer doing stuff all by itself – I’d probably feel similar if I was a passenger in a self-driving car (Ummm, no thanks). He updated Windows, ran some anti-malware software (I think) and did some other things. Just 2 hours later, that’s right – I said, ‘2 hours’, he had gotten me all patched up and I was good to go.

After we hung up, my computer was humming away like always and I was off to the races – for about 5 minutes. Out of nowhere, my computer (named Biff), reverted back to its old self and weirding out again and deleting stuff. Grrr! What the crap?! Then, just as suddenly, it went away, and Biff started behaving like himself again. It’s been perfectly fine ever since. Now, I’m not a huge subscriber in all things supernatural, but my computer seems to be a victim of demonic possession and we’re definitely dealing with a “Ghost in the Machine” here. At the very least, my computer has a disease much like herpes. It really can’t be cured; we just have to deal with the occasional flare-ups now and then. Luckily, they’re few and far between.

So, in conclusion, I guess I need to also add “I have my trusty and faithful computer friend at my disposal and it’s almost always in tip-top shape” to my “5 Things I’m Grateful For” Daily Affirmation routine. That thing has taken on a life of its own, it keeps growing longer. It’s like the NCAA athletic conferences: The Big 10 has 18 schools, Big 12 has 16 and Pac-10 has 8. Always changing. Very confusing, difficult to keep track.

Thanks for reading, I guess the only thing worse than actually having computer problems yourself is reading all about someone else’s computer issues.


Lange Haare, egal,

– Jim