Four Short Tales Read online

Addicted

  It’s dark in here, but they will come for me soon.

  It started in 1986 when I first became a Freelance Journalist. I decided that my old typewriter had to go and that I wanted a modern Word Processor. The salesman however, talked me into buying an IBM 286 PS/1 with a twenty-megabyte hard disk, on the grounds that it would allow me much better archiving and retrieval, as everything would be kept on the hard disk. I believed him and bought one and that was my downfall.

  It began when I attempted my first back up of all the software on the hard disc. It crashed and I carried it back to the store. The man had picked up his system floppy discs before I had opened my mouth and I realised I needed to know more about this computing business so that I could rescue things myself instead of paying him.

  I began by reading all the manuals, but they weren’t written for English speakers and some of the things that the DOS manual talked about might as well have been written in Arabic for all the sense I could make of them. I was rapidly getting nowhere, so I started buying a computer magazine for beginners that explained things in plain English. Oh Dear! I then was lost as surely as if I had joined a Korean religious cult.

  Stuck on the front of this magazine were “Disks”. These disks promised all manner of wonderful programs and vitally necessary programs. Programs that promised to make me the most efficient Freelance Journalist on the globe, programs that would enable me to arrange my time and productivity as never before. The trouble was that most of them needed something called Windows before you could operate them and a bit more than the two-megabytes of memory that IBM had seen fit to install in the PS/1.

  Keen to move forwards I rang someone who advertised that they could upgrade your computer. When I told them what I wanted they laughed for a long time. The IBM PS/1 is not upgradeable they told me. You need an IBM compatible. I was puzzled about this because I thought an IBM would be IBM compatible, but it was too late argue, I wanted Windows. I sold the 286 at a 50% loss to a lady who wanted something just to keep her club records in order and bought a 486SX with whole 8Mb of ram for two thousand pounds.

  For a while all went well. Every month I would buy all the computer magazines and play with the programs. I actually bought some of them. Then the magazines changed their tactics and instead of disks, started to give away CD-ROMS with literally dozens of programs. I resisted for nearly a year, but the affects on my health, I was actually dribbling over some of the adverts, persuaded my wife that we could afford it. So I junked the old 486 and splashed out on an up to the minute Pentium III with a sound card and a CD-ROM player, 128 megabytes of memory and Windows98.

  During the next year or so I spent so much time playing with all the programmes on the CD-ROM’s that my writing production suffered and with my income. We had to get rid of the BMW series five and buy a used Seat Marbella, but I was happy. My wife was happy that I was happy even if the garden had began to overtake the house and my friends had began to ask if I had gone away to work because they saw so little of me. Who cared? Who needed people? The free disks became DVD’s and I upgraded again. I stole the hi-fi from the lounge and had wonderful, wonderful multimedia.

  This lasted until about five years ago. I believe I was actually getting better by then. I had regularised my computer sessions between writing and playing to the extent that we were back to a second hand Ford Escort and I had even started to eat with the family again, after my wife had explained to the children who I was. On one occasion, I even managed a whole computerless week with the in-laws with going into cold turkey sweats. Then one of those silly bloody magazines gave away a free month’s introduction to the Internet and I began to travel the world from the security of my office.

  I suggested that I might be more productive if I had a broadband connection to send my writing to the various clients and that’s when my wife rebelled. She had found all the magazine articles on the Internet and the various chat rooms and web sites that I had cut out and hidden in the bottom of the wardrobe and behind the bidet, and she took decisive action with the help of my two burly teenage sons. (Strange that, but I could have sworn that the last time I saw them they were still in short trousers).

  They walled up the window in my office so that I cannot get out and fitted a steel door with a slot for my food tray. From eight in the morning until two in the afternoon, I am allowed the electricity on so that I can work. If I produce the articles and they are up to standard, they feed me and then switch the light off again, so that I can rest. In the evenings, they take me for a walk around the gardens for exercise (They take the leg chains off for this). At twelve midnight they switch on the electricity for four hours and plug in the phone line so that I can visit the world of the Internet. Surfing is the only thing that keeps me sane these days.

  Of course I know about Windows 7 and I know that you can now have machines as fast as light with up to 6Gb of ram because I see it all on the Web. I know you can take photos digitally and that there are special cameras that do this. I know all this and it hurts me as I am still using a Pentium III with only 256 megabytes of memory, but at least that is enough to surf the Net and I live in hope that one day they will let me out and I can catch up with the world again.

  Its dark in here, but I think its nearly time for my exercise period and although that means it will be late at night outside, at least they will have some lights on to relieve the blackness. Then I will be returned to my room and they will switch the electricity on so that I can do some surfing while everyone else sleeps. I don’t know what reason they have given the neighbours for my absence, but my wife was always a resourceful person, so I am sure that it would have been believable.