A Moment of Brilliance

25 November 2010 2 Comments

I love technology.

Mostly, I love to break things. I am a fantastic software tester, because I do things that no user in their right mind would ever do and invariably break the application. Anyone who has worked software support knows there is no such thing as “things no user in their right mind would ever do,” which is why I am an awesome tester. Actually, anyone who has worked support knows there is no such thing as a user in their right mind, which is how the ATT guy and I got to spend yesterday trading euphemisms for user error issues. Hardware, software—people run afoul of the ID-10T error everywhere.

I digress. I break things—that’s what you need to know. I break software, I run computers into the ground, and I have a box of 1,000 cords whose electronic counterparts are landfill in half a dozen countries. I would throw away the cords, too, but I am afraid some of them may be relevant to still-working electronic counterparts that I have in the house. The cords come with me, a sort of tangled testament to my love—and abuse—of gadgets.

Despite my ability to break things, I have never put any stock in extended warranties. If I buy one, I don’t break the gadget until after it expires. If I happen to break the gadget during the extended warranty period, the company refuses to honor it. Ever want to see me fly into a frothing rage? Ask me about Circuit City. I celebrated the day I heard they went bankrupt. What a bunch of crooks.

Back to the point.

In my box of 1,000 cords, I have a wall charger for my Kindle. My Kindle, sadly, is interred in a landfill somewhere. It was a tragic scene - I dropped it, and then slammed it against a table leg while trying to keep it from falling. I murdered it twice over.

That lost, lonely cord haunted me, but it took me a while to replace the Kindle. First I had to mourn Plastic Logic’s decision to scrap the Que and go straight to a second-generation product. Then I had to waffle about the evils of Amazon vs. the stupidity of all other eBook readers for a while. But I finally gave in and bought a Kindle DX, which has arrived. This time, I even bought the two-year extended warranty, which will ensure I will get 49 months’ use out of this Kindle before I break it.

I have been spending all my free time downloading free books and browsing through them. And playing with the Kindle, to see what happens if. So far I haven’t broken the Kindle, but I did manage to break the software I downloaded to manage my books on my computer. I am awesome like that.

One nice trend I have been seeing lately is that authors—particularly ones with many books published—will sometimes offer a free book to get people hooked. This is useful, and I’ve picked up a few here and there—I feel justified in picking up a free eBook if I already own 9 or 10 of the author’s books in print, and I appreciate the chance to sample an author or two whose name I recognize but whose cover and blurb (I am a shallow, shallow shopper) never convinced me to spend money on their books.

I am reading one of the latter books right now. I am 22% of the way through (so says the Kindle, and who’s to argue with an algorithm?) and am still not sure if I want to be reading this book, so it’s probably just as well that I didn’t pay money for it. I would stop reading it, but the next book on my list is War and Peace, and I’d rather save that for the holidays, when it will be fitting.

But as I was reading the equivalent of a luke-warm bath, one character said “thrall” and another thought “slave.”

And I had a moment of brilliance. Or perhaps a moment of “duh.” It’s hard to tell the difference, sometimes.

Thrall: someone in service to a feudal lord. In reality, not very far at all from a slave. Enthralled: to put someone in the state of being a thrall. Thus, to captivate or enslave someone.

For a moment, I basked in my own brilliance. All those times I used enthralled, I thought, and I never really thought about its etymology. It makes perfect sense!

And then I realized I never use “enthralled,” and neither do the people I know, and my revelation has as much practical application as a fireplace popcorn popper. Amusing to trot out at parties, perhaps, but difficult to justify when standing around the water cooler at work.

Nevertheless, I can add “enthralled” to my literary junk-drawer—a hodge-podge collection of ideas of no real use to anyone, anywhere, ever, but kept around in case they become useful sometime. And you never know—maybe I will need this in the future.

After all, I’ve already had to dig through my box of 1,000 spare cords to find my old Kindle charging cord, since my new Kindle charging cord is at the office. For once, my hoarding laziness pack-rat mentality thriftiness paid off—you never know when it could again.

Language and Literature

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