What the fuck is PC Load Letter?

October 24th, 2003 Posted in 2003

I’ve known the type. You probably do to. There are certain people, for example, who know where everything is at all times. If they’re putting away leftovers, they’ve probably got six different types of freezer bags, and they pack away every food item individually (I tend to just dump everything in a garbage bag and toss it to the back of the fridge; this makes it easier to throw out a month from now, since it’s already technically in the garbage). When they buy something new, they not only read the operation manual—they most likely have a nook somewhere in their immaculate homes devoted exclusively to operation manuals, and after reading the latest one, it will be filed away with its new brethren. Their CDs are always, always in alphabetical order (as opposed to caseless and balancing in a foot-high stack on the speaker unit, as at my place).

In being friends with these character types over the years, I’ve learned things about them. First of all, don’t ever show ignorance in front of them on any topic, because they live to explain things and you won’t be going anywhere for several hours. They remember absolutely everything you tell them, which makes embarrassing drunken confessions even more embarrassing, so it’s best to avoid drinking with them. And most of them are good at understanding how computers work—mainly, I suspect, because a computer more than anything else on the planet accurately describes how their Vulcan brains operate, and they feel a kinship that us silly imperfect mortals simply arent giving them.

There’s a second type of person I’ve befriended over the years. Actually, one was a housemate of mine once. This type isn’t nearly as fastidious or organized as the first type—point in fact, of the few I’ve known, most couldn’t tell you where their housecoats are if you asked, even though, 95% of the time, the answer would be: on them, with stains.

This type isn’t any good with hierarchy and organization, so you’d think they’d be no good at computers at all, but as I understand it, it’s probably someone like this who invented one in the first place. This is the character type who’d forget to eat for days at a time if you opened up a radio in front of them and asked them to figure out how it worked. If you did that with the first type of person, you’d come back to find every component part neatly piled and labelled, with maybe a 70% chance they figured out how it worked. With the second type, there’s maybe a a 10% chance they’d figure out how it worked, because you’d come back to find they’d turned it into a blender robot that can conjugate Spanish verbs. If you’d put the same test to me, you’d come back to find the radio not put back together but plugged in anyway and showering sparks, a classic rock station pumped to full volume coming from the speaker, and me under the table, surrounded by empty beer bottles and giggling something about rocking you like a hurricane.

The point of all this character description being that, in my interaction with both of these types of people, I’ve realized that both of them are amazing at making cool things happen on computers. You wouldn’t necessarily want to rely on either of them to go rent you a movie—in the case of the former, they’d come back with whatever Rotten Tomatoes told them would be statistically good, which probably stars Anthony Hopkins and will rock seven kinds of boredom out of you, let alone hurricanes; and in the case of the latter, you’d simply never see them again, because on the way to the video store they’d find a beanstalk or a bag of nails or something, and they’d immediately forget about everything else to puzzle over their new find like an archeologist at a dig.

I mention these people because I’ve recently attempted to upgrade my Trailer Trash site a little, and have realized how astoundingly bad I am at making anything cool happen with computers. The sheer amount of time it takes to teach myself any concept at all—about CSS, or Perl, or MySQL databases—is such that it’d simply be easier to let your pet tromp on the keyboard until they came up with the right code than trust me to get the job done.

I suppose I could give some horrible excuse about my “creative mind” and how it can’t be burdened with that kind of right brain activity, but that’d just be horseshit—the truth is I’m devastatingly retarded and have no attention span. I prefer speed-reading topics to get the “gist” of them than immersing myself in any one thing—if I can’t grasp something within twenty minutes of effort, my brain officially labels it as not worth grasping, and I move onto the next thing, invariably .jpegs of breasts.

So understandably, setting up a MySQL database of Trailer Trash reviews, complete with neato stylesheet features and cool archiving, has been nothing short of hell. I dont know code. I dont like code. I dont understand the concepts behind any of it, other than that if I take something that used to work and fuck around with it until it stops working, then back up one step, tada! I’m done, goodnight.

So I salute the character types I mentioned earlier, because I’ve always secretly thought the sorts of things I’ve watched you do as boring and pointless, when in fact I’ve since learned that they’re boring and pointless and really really hard.

I’m beginning to wish my sites made money. Then I could start exhibiting the characteristics of my favorite character type of all: the guy who throws money at obstacles, making them instantly disappear as if by magic.