In the early nineties, when I was in college, my mother worked for the executive department of a Certain Regional Bakery. (The name of which I will obscure, because of that whole eyeball-sucking lawsuit thing.) It was the case that all the executives of this certain bakery used Macintoshes, back in the days of System 6 and 7, and all was well; their computers worked easily with each other and did everything that was required of them. And since my mother and I have owned Macintoshes since approximately the 1984 Commercial, she was happy and productive, and any time she had a question, I could usually answer it for her. If I couldn't, the computer science majors down the hall always could.
Enter the bane of my mother's existence: the BIS. Which didn't actually stand for Bakery Information Services, but was close.
To this day I'm still not sure what the BIS' problem was. Either they were staffed with drooling morons (quite possible; what computer science graduate would choose to work for a bakery? Especially during the tech boom?) or they were all inveterate PC users that were merely deigning to work with the executive's Macs. Possibly both.
Every month or so, I would get a phone call from my mother. Who would very very calmly get me to walk her through removing the latest BIS iniquity from her computer. It was invariably some esoteric and unclever addition that would prevent at least half of her applications from running.
And then I would talk her through removing the BIS iniquity from every other computer in the executive wing.
And life was good; there was the BIS, and myself, the antiBIS, and my mother and her coworkers caught in between.
I suppose it might have made a reasonably typical fantasy novel, in some alternate dimension, with a little editing... but that would have made me Gandalf, and I doubt I could raise a decent beard. Anyway.
Every once in a while, the BIS would perpetrate an iniquity so earthshakingly mindnumbingly ridiculous that I couldn't talk my mother through removing it over the phone. So, leaping on my trusty steed (well, getting into my trusty Geo Metro) I would travel to her office, bearing sheaves of magical floppy disks, and pit my wits against the BIS' latest threat. It might take hours, but eventually, I would break their evil spell, and the clarity of the computers would be restored. And the elves would dance and the dwarves would drink ale and... no.
It was at the bakery that I first saw and heard the terror that is the Sad Mac with tones: a little dead Macintosh icon, with two lines of hex underneath it, and a funereal organ riff. In essence, this means 'this computer is too screwed up to even recognize its startup protocol and cannot be booted'. Amazingly enough, it was only indirectly the BIS' fault.
You see, the woman in question had gotten so sick of losing access to her data that she had started keeping it on a floppy disk. This was generally adequate protection against the depredations of the BIS. So when she went to boot up her computer the next time, she pushed in the floppy, and... Sad Mac. I was called.
Battling my way through hordes of evil twisted monsters (no) I made my way to the holy grove (no!) and attempted to diagnose the problem with the magic at my command (dammit, no). Sure enough, the same thing happened. But when I pulled out the floppy disk and rebooted, everything was fine.
Carefully prodding at the floppy disk, I discovered foul magic most dire (no dammit!). Hidden in a folder deep in the bowels of the diskette was: System and Finder 1.2.
So this poor Mac II would hit those at startup and try to boot from THEM instead of the nice System7 it was supposed to use, and go BLAAAAARGH all over her desk.
Easy enough to fix, and it added to my reputation as a fearsome wizard nicely. (I really will stop that eventually.)
Eventually my mother moved on from the bakery, and I moved on as well, leaving the rest of them in the clutches of the BIS; once the Prophesied Hero arrives in our Realm, we shall gallop forth and free them! The time is nigh!
... no dammit.
Replies: add your comment: currently 3 comments
*snerks* I have produced the sad-Mac icon exactly once, and it was accompanied by the funeral tones of death. (Did you know that you can troubleshoot a Mac boot-ROM problem by the tones that it makes? If you're at all musical, and you have decent pitch, you can differentiate between the various sounds it makes. I always thought that was neat.) It happened when I was in the process of trying to get my old Performa 550 to run NetBSD. (quote on startup of NetBSD, as it kills the Mac OS: "So I sez to him -- the real way to do it is --" and the screen blacks out and starts booting BSD. I found this very funny.)
Anyway. I'll stop babbling now. :)
Posted by D @ 11/20/2001 12:17 AM EST
My SO and I once had to shoot one of my extremely irritable custom-patched-together machines by beep codes. Which involved me sitting with a phone on one ear, the other ear practically in a computer, trying to explain exactly what those beeps sounded like.
I personally think the manual for motherboards that do that should include a section that's like those obnoxious music-playing birthday cards. You open the little flap and it beeps, and you compare beeps till you find the one you're getting, and use it to look up a diagnosis. -_-
Posted by Ed @ 11/20/2001 04:40 AM EST
Never having owned a Mac or really worked with one indepthly, I can't say much about this....I'm really not that computer-literate. I can do a lot of basic things, mainly. I took one class at school, and it sucked, didn't teach me anything, and that was because the teacher did not want to teach us. Plus, it was Visual Basic, which I am sure I will never use anyway...
I guess my lack of computer enginuity could make me a SadWolf... :(
Posted by Wolf @ 11/20/2001 08:47 AM EST
