Came bopping up to the office Friday after lunch in town, intending to finish up reports for a Monday Board meeting, then print everything out and make copies.  

After that, I intended to knock out my weekly syndicated newspaper column, and finish up the afternoon typing up a talk I was scheduled to make, in addition to leading the music, on Kairos #25 the next weekend at the Central MS Correctional Facility in Rankin County.

I had caught up all the Board reports that morning and left the compooter on, so that it wouldn’t need to warm up again. That sucker is getting old, just like me, so it takes a little while to warm up.
I settled into the chair and tapped the space bar to bring up the screen.

The screen did come up: dark gray, with darker black words.

Several years ago, on this same compooter, I had an experience with what my Resident Compooter Expert termed “The Blue Screen of Death.” He was able to resuscitate the machine that time with minimum files lost.

The Dark Gray Screen of Death is worse!

Nothing that I did brought up anything that looked vaguely familiar, so after almost an hour of trying this and that, I gave up and called my Resident Compooter Expert, who happens to be my son-in-law. He came right out, messed with the innards for a while, reconnected everything, and cut it on.
The Dark Gray Screen of Death again.

“I’ve got some tools at home,” he advised me like a doctor giving a terminal patient the bad news.

“I’ll work on it, but it doesn’t look good.”

Right about then, his business partner called to say that his compooter wouldn’t work either, and did John have any advice to get it going? He did not, but this was beginning to look suspicious.  

I just re-read “One Second After” which is a scary book about an EMP attack on the USA, when a nuclear bomb explodes in the upper atmosphere and sends out an Electromagnetic Pulse which wipes out all compooters in everything that has compooters in it.

About the only vehicles in that town still running were an old Edsel, a Volkswagen van and a WWII Jeep. Electric grids went down across America, no vehicles would run, no phones, water except by gravity flow.

Then I remembered that our microwave oven had not reheated my coffee after lunch. Microwaves, compooters, what was next?

Several years ago, many folks in this area had experienced appliance failures beaucoup, for reasons that baffled the dealers, who had to replace a lot of the electronic “boards” on warranty guarantees, and our dealer ended up going out of business partly because of those expenses.

Turned out that the narcotic-searching helicopters flying over the area were using some type infrared detector which fried electronics over a large territory. Someone somewhere convinced them to install some kind of shielding on the choppers, and we got it stopped. Maybe the narcs were again using equipment that zapped us once more?

I dunno. But my compooter was sho’nuff zapped, and I ain’t bad about backing stuff up regularly like I should, so I’ve got to rebuild from scratch on a lot of stuff.  

Some is just gone. John says he may can salvage some files eventually. We bought another microwave that heated up the taco soup that night okay. If the terrorists are really figuring on zapping us large-scale like the book prophesied, my old Ford pickup might be the main transportation out here at Brownspur.

But I still had to knock out that talk, so I settled in after supper on Betsy’s compooter, which is newer and has a different operating system. That system is NOT user-friendly, at least to me. I can only hope that some of the words of encouragement I used while writing that talk will not be in the text when I say it.

If, of course, I can ever figure out how to print the dang thing!

Y’all do know the Bible verse that says, “Compooters are Tools of Satan,” and that “Internet” is actually “Ten Satans” spelled backwards, don’t you?