Strictly Taboo

You never know when Ol’ Blue Eyes will show up.

I made a surprise connection with Frank Sinatra last week at the most strangest time.

Of course, I suppose any time you make a connection with someone who died 24 years ago it's bound to be a bit bizarre.

Nevertheless...

In my last post, I described the category five level of frustration I had to deal with when buying a new compound.

Well, it seems that streak of outrageous fortune is trailing after me like a rabid bloodhoundas I tried to migrate my data from the old machine to the new one.

Thanks to the geniuses at Apple, I had to do perform this procedure myself. And it was nothing short of hellacious.

I got on the phone with the company and buckled down for a long night of tech torture.

I was talking with one woman for a solid 30 minutes—who was quite helpful, actually—until the line went dead.

I called back and got patched in with a fresh techie. By this time, I was a bit frazzled, and I dropped an f-bomb or two.

The techie made some comment about “derogatory language” and I told her to spare me the lectures as it was her company’s fault I was in this mess in the first place.

Like I said, I was frazzled.

We finally got set-up and I went to bed while the computer churned out all my material.

That Sly, Come Hither Stare

When I got up early the next morning, I saw the migration had finished ahead of schedule.

But something was eating at me.

This was too easy. Something had gone wrong, and all my most precious documents had been destroyed.

I knew I was just being nuts and I forced myself to stay away from the computer until the sun came up.

However, it turns out I was right.

My Microsoft Word program wasn't funtioning and while my documents were all listed on the new computer, I couldn’t open them.

Now I’m on the phone with Microsoft, two computers like an air traffic controller on Christmas Eve, and I am going berserk.

And that’s when “Witchcraft” started playing in my head.

I couldn’t believe it. I love Frank Sinatra, and I really enjoy that tune, but I hadn’t listened to it recently and it was totally at odds with my twisted mental state.

The song is cool, slick and romantic, while I was frazzled, freaked and fed up.

I needed some furious rapper shrieking obscenities or a death metal anthem just shrieking, not the Chairman of the Board.

C’mon, Frank, I’m trying to have a conniption fit here.

Do I interrupt you when you’re singing “New York, New York”? Please, let me do it my way.

Stripping My Conscience Bare

But I had no defense for it and the heat was too intense for it. Perhaps my subconscious mind was taunting me, playing a mellow tune on my mental jukebox while the house was burning out.

Or it might have been voicing my feelings about computers, as I am a certified technophobe who considers all modern technology as vaguely satanic.

Perhaps my id deliberately played this sophisticated song as way of calming me down—sort of like speed bumps along the Highway to Hysteria.

Maybe my inner self was reminding me that my way wasn’t the right way.

This would be a bit out of the ordinary as my subconscious mind has a strong preference for self-sabotage.

As for my computer, it turns out that Word had gotten corrupted.

So now I have to email all my documents to my new computer, which means the old clunker is still a part of my life.

I had complained about Apple’s incompetence for not migrating my data at their downtown Brooklyn store, but the really twisted thing here is that this probably worked out for the best.

If I had left my old machine with Apple, the tech staff would have cleared the memory and tossed the computer into the scrap heap—along with all my documents.

My blood runs cold when I think of that dreadful scenario, but luckily I didn’t fall prey to that wicked witchcraft.