Some people are really stupid when it comes to owning their computers.

I consider a computer as a very private piece of property. As much as I accommodate and welcome my family members in using my computer—the only computer in the house—I don’t like it when they get too comfortable. Case in point, a password-protected user account on my computer. Neither my sister nor my mother have that privilege. i consider it an overstay of welcome.

So when I had to deal with what I dealt with today, on a friend of a friend’s compter, I felt my blood pressure go through the roof. Said people were having monitor problems. Starting Windows XP on regular mode brought up a message on the monitor: “Out of range.” and went on to list the display parameters that were within the computer’s limits. At first I thought that there was a problem with the monitor, unti I found out that I could actually get it to work in safe mode.

It turned out that they recently had a new housemate who paid some semblance of rent. She had her own user account complete with password protection, and I could only make a safe guess: she probably did something with her display settings that made the monitor and computer incompatible with each other. To make things worse, she left a note taped on the monitor saying it was busted. Only, I was able to make it work on safe mode.

I was not able to make the monitor work on regular mode. I was, however, able to feed the dumb bitch a trayful of crow for insisting that it was none of her doing, and claiming that the monitor was broken. (Dear friends the entire story is too long to go into detail and this isn’t something I feel like discussing over a six pack.)

Ultimately, a little bit of craputer etiquette is in order. If you’re rooming with someone who owns a computer and you don’t, your rent usually doesn’t cover a computer highjack. It hardly means that you have the privilege to set up a password-protected user account on a computer that is not your own. If you want to keep files to yourself, that’s what floppy drives and CD-Rs are for. Said computer highjack is less covered by your rent once a problem with the computer manifests itself for all users, probably through a doing of your own. Then again, if you’re on the wire for rent money you might aas well pimp your computer instead of getting evicted.

Oh well.