NEW COMPUTER…SAME ARCHIVE: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Buying a new computer comes with a problem: making the new computer as much like the old computer as possible. This takes a month. Doesn’t matter how large the archive is. Over the course of a month’s use, your new computer will throw things at you on a daily basis.
   There are plenty of what-the-fuck moments.
   I turned things up to eleven. Windows 11. If I could drip disdain off that, I would. Sloped type will have to do. Going to a new operating system, you find that something obvious is no longer listed under a really obvious category.
   Purely for the sake of change, it’s been listed elsewhere. You resort to the computerised equivalent of a crystal fucking ball, soggy goat entrails, the bone runes, and wild fucking guesses to take you to the place where you can not quite do the thing.
   Getting there really is just part of the journey. Once you are there, you still have to get there some more. And then your troubles start afresh. This goes on…daily…until, over the course of a few weeks, you’ve finally relocated all the things that have been put in different places.
   I’m a month in, and I’ve covered everything. (This is a lie.) It is aggravating. (This is the truth.) The computer itself is fantastic. I won’t have to upgrade until it becomes a lump of fused circuits. My archive is the same, but that archive has to change.
   So when do you review your archive? Periodically. But always when a new computer becomes the latest home for the same old archive. Some essential files are no longer essential. I look in a folder marked ESSENTIAL FILES, and I see I still have software parcels there from several computers ago – and things were very different, then.
   When I typed by candlelight, with a sepia-toned background, in a cave on the edges of the great wasteland, I found those primitive computer tools quite useful. But this computer is in high orbit over the planet, and I must put the stone axes away. And so…
   Once again, I find myself reaching for the flamethrower. The old archive is installed. Sounds like I am putting a puppet government in place. The basic rule of computing is unchanging. THOU SHALT FIND EMPTY FILE FOLDERS UNTIL THE ENDS OF TIME.
   Been burning those. They burn quickly. Given that I am using a new system, the new system has been hindering my efforts aiding my quest. I had a warning about data allocation. This was an e-mail problem.
   That’s when I remembered I had an e-mail archive. From computer to computer, the e-mail mountain has always stayed in the background. You look over your shoulder, and it glowers in the distance.
   I have loads of e-mail addresses for different purposes. Personal. Business. Assassination. (That last one is also business – but never personal.) Here I am, checking my archive again. But…the e-mail stuff is somewhere else. And somewhere else, it is giving me a warning. If I am not careful, there’ll be a landslide. Even far away, that’s a problem I’ll have to clear up.
   Will I clear this up? I’ve been chipping away at it. Number of unread e-mails? Close to zero. Occasionally, there’ll be a mad flurry of messages from three companies at once…and I’ll find a ridiculous number of messages waiting for me. Ten. Holy fuck, what’s happened? Nothing’s happened. No emergency.
   Electronic messages arrive in dribs and drabs. But then they build up. An e-mail comes in. I read it. Often, that’s the only action I need to take. Or I’ll answer one. And then, as there’ll be further action down the line…I shunt these e-mails to folders.
   They sit and wait. If nothing happens, gasp, nothing happens. And here I am, now, with a new computer, receiving a warning. So I check. Holy fucking shit. Number of unread e-mails? We’re at zero. Number of e-mails in folder? Oh.
   I’ve taken a look. Peeked in. Reached for the disinfectant. First, I found some e-mails were dropped into the wrong folders. I made corrections. Then I did a lot of burning. Messages going back years, dealing with companies that stopped trading. People retired or died. What was relevant then is not relevant now.
   For historical purposes, it is interesting to see what was going on, where, how things turned out…but tumbleweeds gathered in one place take up a whole lot of space for a whole lot of nothing. Burn, burn burn…
   I had 400-odd e-mail entries there, for one e-mail address. How many of these were still relevant? All of them – for taking up online storage space. I was given a warning. Warning heeded. I roasted 200 e-mails in the flames.
   By fuck, that’s a tedious process. And so…I’ll burn more when I feel like it. Killing 200 certainly relieved space-concerns. I look at a few of those e-mail boxes and they are as fresh as they’ll ever be. No e-mails in there.
   A few have a single e-mail left. This tells me I updated a password for a site, and that site is keyed to a particular e-mail address. Handy, if I have two accounts for the same site. The lone e-mail is a signpost telling me that account is tied to here and not to there.
   Junk mail is non-existent. As I have junk mail folders for EVERY account, I am happy to report that Windows is filtering like a fucking zealot. I just wasn’t interested in helping the late Sani Abacha liberate his considerable fortune from those pesky Swiss bank accounts. He can pay his own processing fees. Through his many surviving relatives, I guess.
   Music is, for some reason, the hardest transfer from old machine to new. Everything copies over. But Windows now only operates a legacy Media Player. I know this as the player tells me so when I hover the mouse over a very familiar icon.
   Every time Media Player was “upgraded” people complained. It doesn’t seem to be a particularly complex piece of kit. Don’t fix it. You’ve made it better. Okay, now fix it. You’ve sent it to live on a nice farm, far away in the countryside.
   Here’s a legacy photo of the Media Player, gambolling through the fields, enjoying retirement. You can see Farmer Giles in the background, readying his shotgun for use against a plague of rats.
   And that’s the last legacy photo we see of legacy Media Player. I moved the archive across, and found loads of unknown albums. They were all one track long, and they were all track one.
   I went looking for albums that were known, named, and had been mugged of their first tracks. It used to be the case that fixing this shit…well, it was easy, right. No longer. I cast the mystic runes, sent a text message to Mount Olympus, and pressed a few buttons on the off-fucking-chance.
   This is why it can take a month to recreate the office you were using before. For a week, you are too busy to listen to music. I’ll put some music on. What’s the worst that can happen? Oh.
   And so it goes with MANY OTHER THINGS. I want the name of the fried mushroom of an employee who decided to plant the menu in the fucking middle. The middle. We read from left to fucking right in the English language, you low-rent Satanist!
    It’s not the Satanism I object to, but the low-rent nature of the move.
   Then there was this fucking invisible screen just out of sight at the top of the screen. First, I had to identify it by running online searches guessing at what the fuck it was. When I strayed into the general area, I honed my search.
   This did not improve my mood. But at least my search was honed. I’ve forgotten whatever the fuck it was. All I had to know was the location of the sub-fucking-menu housing the command to delete its thorny arse.
   There’s a calendar. But it isn’t the calendar. It looks very like the calendar from before. Today I discovered the aching need to place an event on that calendar. But, no, not on that calendar.
   Right, then. It must be an app. (It is.) And that app must be listed here, somewhere. (It fucking wasn’t.) I’m looking for a fucking calendar app, not the Northwest fucking Passage. If you aren’t looking for the arse-end of the moon, you shouldn’t have to go to the arse-end of the moon to find the place you are looking for.
   Basingstoke, you say? Wait a bit, while I hop on my rocket-ship to the arse-end of the moon. That’s where they put the index. And that is the only thing on the arse-end of the moon worth visiting. But not repeatedly.
  Turns out, Basingstoke is on this planet…and not on the arse-end of the moon. Who knew? I fucking knew, before I had to climb into the rocket-ship to fly off and confirm the bloody obvious.
   Any-fucking-way…
   Opening a calendar I can add an event to…proved a tedious prospect. I found it quicker to grab a piece of paper and scribble a reminder there. Job fucking done. Move the fuck along. Nothing to fucking see here…except a piece of paper, obviously. And I don’t have to travel to the arse-end of the fucking moon to read that.