Santi is the name of my iMac. I named him after the Renaissance painter Raphael (yeah he really did have a last name!) For those of you who are not aware of my madness stilo, I tend to name my large scale purchases and as anyone who has ever bought a computer from Apple knows, those suckers tend to cost a lot. But they’re very well worth it; I did not think it was possible to love a computer but all that changed when my lovely Santi came to my home one fine day in September and I plugged him in and he seemed to light up just for me.
So it probably goes without saying that I really LOVE my Mac. It’s true what they say about Mac owners; we practically worship at the feet of our babies, and how could you not? When I had my Dell laptop and I wanted to boot it up, I hit the “on” switch and then did chores around the house for about 5-10 minutes while it tried to make up its mind about whether or not it actually wanted to come on that day. Later on, it became a struggle between good and evil when it came down to whether or not it to wanted to crash or inform me about my numerous illegal operations while I was in the middle of doing something important. As the JPEGS and the Mp3 files started to add up, my increasingly belligerent computer was becoming a real hindrance.
After deciding that I wanted to really invest more time in trying to get my art career off the ground, I knew I had to upgrade my tools and after hearing so many Mac users sing praises from mountain tops about the joys of their computers, I decided to take the plunge and get one. Oh yes, as I alluded to before, from the first day my little Santi came into my life, I knew it was going to be magic. Imagine being able to restart your computer in roughly 20 seconds! No angry little messages telling me that it was going to shut down because it was sick of me and my damn illegal operations! Seamless jumping from application to application. I was in heaven, I tell you.
Given all this, you can imagine my horror last night when Santi seemed to go into cardiac arrest and started gasping for air. Okay, he didn’t really go into cardiac arrest and maybe those clicking noises he was making weren’t him trying to breathe but I sure was ready to have a fit. I was trying to edit a digital image of one of my paintings that I had saved on a CD-ROM. I knew the file was huge; the guy who photographed the painting had burned the image of it on the disc but warned me that it was huge but I figured no job was too big for my Santi, right? WRONG; Santi did not agree. When I popped the disc in, the little icon for the disc appeared and I happily clicked on it, waiting for my image to magically appear. No dice; there was a silence and soon Santi starting, “hmmmmming” and then froze. Suddenly I hear clicking. Then silence…then more clicking. I frowned, clicked around on several icons to get Santi to open the file but he just refused. He just started clicking….faster and faster.
Evidently, Santi was displeased with these rounds of commands and he decided to express his dismay through making furious clicking noises. Ok, Dude, I can take a hint. I clicked “eject” several times but this only made Santi click even louder and faster. This was when the beads of sweet start rolling down my head and I frantically tried to console Santi by talking him down off the ledge and stroking his monitor, “Oh no, please, baby, don’t die on me. Mommy paid a lot of money for you and she really doesn’t want to have to lug you into a cab to the Apple store and explain to them what she did to you.”
This did not seem to comfort him as Santi only clicked harder and louder. I jumped up and paced around the apartment trying to think of what to do, thinking maybe if I gave him his space, he would calm down and spit out the CD. This did not seem to work either. Finally, I hit the restart button. There was a pause and the screen went blank. Within seconds that famous Zen-like “dong” noise that all Macs made could be heard and Santi regained consciousness, sans the awful clicking noise. Tentatively, I pressed the eject bottom. Santi dutifully and cheerfully spat out the disc and peace returned to the valley.
To Santi’s credit, had this ordeal gone down with my Dell, it simply would’ve given me the finger, sputtered noisily and then exploded in my face. Not my Santi! He hung in there like a champ and I learned my lesson: do not piss him off by uploading ridiculously large files on his hard drive that are like the equivalent to kryptonite to Superman. Give those jobs to the professionals and let their computers explode.
So now all is well….and I still love my Santi.
