Spinning Wheel of Death

I have a Mac, which means I have the “spinning wheel of death” when Mac wants me to wait for it to do its thang. People with PC’s get an hour glass, but Macs have this little color wheel that rotates, letting you know that the Mac is thinking and you’d better not interrupt if you know what’s good for you.

I learned this the hard way – the same way I learn everything on the computer. I typed out something complex in a table and then got frustrated because the table wouldn’t size the way I wanted it to. So I tugged it with my cursor on one side and then the other. But I went too fast, and the confounded spinning wheel came up. I kept trying to move the table, but it wouldn’t budge. I tried to save the document but the program was frozen like a kid’s tongue stuck to an icy flagpole. It wouldn’t budge, wouldn’t respond. Then it crashed, and my entire document was sucked away like a frog sucking up a fly.

When something won’t work on the computer, I start clicking and trying something else. When that only escalates my aggravation, I click something else. The spinning wheel does not like this. Not one bit. It comes out of nowhere and sits right in the middle of what I’m doing and takes its own sweet time to go away. If I so much as twitch a finger on my mouse, I know what that wheel is going to say, “I told you to BACK OFF, and you wouldn’t listen – you never listen, and I’ve warned you over and over and over again. How does someone get through a dumb thick brain like yours? When you see me, you better start running because if you so much as LOOK at me the wrong way, I’m going to send everything you got right out to space where you’ll never, ever, ever see it again. You hear?”

That wheel is a bee-otch, I can tell you that right now. Sometimes my computer starts running slow for no apparent reason. Maybe it got a little too wild with the PC and it’s got a hangover. Who knows what goes on in my office after I go to bed? There’s a radio right beside the PC, making techno-funk that the PC and Mac can’t resist – they dance and party all through the night – their mice snuggling in the dark shadows. Or they could spend the whole night making fun of the old calculator that only has numbers and not letters. Who knows why these computers run slow for a while for no reason.

When it happens, out pops that spinning wheel, like a rat coming up out of the toilet bowl. This actually happened once to someone I knew. They heard some splashing in the toilet and opened the lid. There was a rat, sometimes referred to as a “sewer rat” thrashing around in the toilet bowel. Apparently it had come from somewhere. I don’t know what they did with it – in this situation, what could you do? Flush the toilet screeching, “Go back where you came from, you swarthy vermin?” Would you throw it a life raft and succumb to your child’s pleas of “Can we keep it mommy, pleeeee-ease? We’ll take really good care of it, honest we will. Can we, can we, can we?”

That’s the point; you don’t know WHAT to do with that spinning wheel any more than you know what to do with that unwelcome varmint in your toilet. If you wait long enough it MIGHT go away without doing any damage. Of course the rodent isn’t going anywhere, and you’ll have to deal with him as best you can. I’d advise you to be nice to him because brutality to a sewer rat might give you bad dreams. It would me.

That spinning wheel and a sewer rat rank at about the same place on my list of unwanted things in my life. I love my Mac, and it’s fast and easy and fun to operate, but I hate that wheel. Always will.