I'm a PC, so as you would expe-ct, I get hate-crimed a lot by the Mac-jority. To date, I've had my bike tires slashed five times, three bricks thrown through my bedroom window with notes telling me to Burn in Dell,"" and seven girlfriends' fathers who've fired shotguns in my direction after discovering their daughters were necking with ""Windows wiper."" It's getting gal-dang ridiculous. I got kicked out of the Velvet the other night just because some coastie hussy ratted me out to the bouncer for being Dellish. You should have seen the look on her face. Pure hate. People like to say the civil rights movement ended with Obama's election, but at one of the whitest public universities in America, we've just found a new way to channel our proclivity for prejudice: computerism.
It wasn't always this way. I remember back in nineteen nickety-six when my dad came home with a Gateway 2000. The neighbors didn't ostracize us or move to a more Mac-ish cul-de-sac in the suburbs; we remained a respectable, PC-owning household. Now, if I pull out my Inspiron during lecture I get coffees thrown at me until I flee the building. I've even had a professor who, upon discovering my computer-icity, refuse to respond to the emails that originated from my ""barbaric"" machine. I'm not going to back down, though. I will not stand to be treated like a second-class student just because as an incoming freshman I chose to blow my graduation money on a computer that didn't have Eve's apple on its cover. No sir. Nor am I going to go the nonviolent route, either. That part of me died when I watched my brother's HP get Jamba-Juiced in College Library by some bigot who didn't care for his optical drive. I'm going to fight back like the humans did in Independence Day.
Most Mac users aren't even aware of their prejudice. They just think their computers are so friggin' superior that it's just a matter of time before that's all anybody has, as if the new president has promised an iMac in every home and a MacBook on every lap. Well guess what? We PCs are still here, and until we get better-paying jobs, we ain't going nowhere. We've seen this happen in our country before, when the white settlers assumed the uncivilized Indian tribes would just melt away in the face of modernity. Well, we've learned from the Indians, you Steve Jobsists, so we know not to accept your small-pox ridden jump drives in exchange for our precious Microsoft Office software. The peoples of the PC will band together; the Dells, the Toshibas, the Compaqi, even our little Eee PC brothers. Together we will resist the tide of the white laptops and retain our rightful places at the Council Fire in the Great Infolab.
It's not that I don't see the value of the Mac life. As a young child, I enjoyed countless hours playing Number Munchers and Z-Bug on the green-screened Macs at school. Even now, I can appreciate that four-screen thing your MacBooks can do and the comfort of going with the flow. But there is value in the traditions of my people, too. And I sold my shares of Apple stock before it took off, so I'm still really bitter about that. I think there is reason for hope, though. If the PC and Mac peoples can just learn to understand one another, we may be able to construct a society where my children can play backyard football in peace on their PC, and your children can look at four screens of porn on their powerful MacBook Pros. But like any dream, it will take struggles and sacrifices to achieve.
In an age when more and more aspects of our everyday lives transpire on a screen of some sort, securing equal computing rights has never been a more critical issue. Not long ago, we began to buy shoes and register for classes online. At present, we watch television and read the newspaper off the Internet. In the future, I expect we will all meet our spouses on eHarmony and our friends on iChat. But until we all have iPhones, it's important we respect the different computers that we were born into college with and realize that diversity is what makes our campus great. So compute, and let compute. But if any of you make fun of my crappy Dell again, I swear I'll rip your fucking space bars out.
Does anyone remember Z-Bug? Tell David at dhottinger@wisc.edu if you do.
