Kathleen Kultgen Horner
'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a peripheral was stirring, not even a mouse; The modem was hung by the keyboard with care In hopes that a download soon would be there. The pirates were nestled all snug in their beds While visions of unprotects danced in their heads. And Kathleen in her kerchief, and I in my cap Had just settled down for a long winter's nap, When up on the hard drive there arose such a clatter, I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter. Away to the monitor I flew like a flash, Sat down at the keyboard, gave the spacebar a mash. The sight on the screen, a'flicker with snow Gave the luster of power surge to the menu below. When, what to my wandering eyes should appear, But an autoexec.bat that seemed rather queer. With a little print driver so lively and quick, I knew in a moment I had seen a new trick. More rapid than eagles my curser it came; My voice box whistled, and shouted, and called me by name. "Now format, now rename, copy, and enter! On num lock, on caps lock, on scroll lock, and printer. To the top of the page, to the top of the doc, Now tab it and bold it and merge it and block." As utilities that build up the CPU speed Clash with just the programs I need, So up to the screen top the curser it flew With a RAM full of memory and an extension board too. And then, in a twinkling I heard on the speaker, The grinding of the hard drive growing much weaker. As I tried to reboot and turn it around, The attributes changed from blue into brown. I hit the control, the alt, and delete. The message it gave me, I cannot repeat. It asked me to Ignore, Retry, or Abort. It told me the parallel had become the comm port. Its lights how they twinkled; its pixels how merry. Its prompts were all scrambled, like a bowl full of cherries. It sounded just like it wanted to blow; The screen was suddenly white as the snow. It scrolled the directory before my eyes With programs I didn't even recognize. It wouldn't see D; it wouldn't see E. I couldn't get out of B into C. Norton's tried to read it; It finally found the FAT; But alas!, the disk was faulty, And couldn't reformat. Away flew Windows; Away flew Explorer; Away flew the WinZip; Right out with the Imager. The spreadsheets were spreading; The footers were heading; What once had been memory Was close to forgetting. When the grinding was over And the smoke had all cleared, I looked at the unit, And it was just as I feared. The 40 gig wonder had crashed in the night. I'll never be able to block out that sight! So tell everyone to avoid my plight; Back up! Back up! Merry Christmas! Good Night!
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