my computer is still a mess

The nice guy from the company came and fixed it yesterday (new motherboard! free!) and now I've spent the whole afternoon NOT doing the billions of things I have to do for class and my summer's work, but trying to rid it of 702 viruses. Yes, 702. Most of which seem to be in inaccessible files and can't be healed. Or vaulted. Or deleted. Which means that I cannot download things onto the computer - it just freaks out and restarts itself. This thing has a mind of its own, I tell you. It's like a child. Or a puppy. I have no control. I only managed to get antivirus software on there in the first place because I downloaded it to my (new, replacement for stolen) flash drive from another computer and then snuck it onto this one before it noticed.

While I was waiting for an available computer from which to download the antivirus, five annoying people were playing on the computers in the "communications center" doing things like reading about Football 2006 and printing five separate Mapquest pages (how many trips can you go on? Before the next time you access a computer?) and I started feeling borderline irrate, because I needed to do IMPORTANT THINGS like get antivirus software for my laptop so that I wouldn't need those computers anymore. I tried to remind myself of how long I waited patiently for things to happen in Liberia, but it turns out that this is not, after all, Liberia, and my patience level is completely different. In Liberia (Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, and so on) I can wait indefinitely, just sitting and watching the world go by. In the law school in New York, it makes me crazy, because I know that those web pages are loading instantaneously. How can it take them so long? One girl was writing a paper in the communications center. The very height of these computers (standing height) should tell you that they are not intended for such purposes. Go to the library! Plus, I have important things to do, and no one is going to take, "I was waiting for a computer" as a good excuse in this land of multiple computers per person when I have a computer.

I was waiting for a computer.