Mac vs. PC Read online

  MAC VS. PC

  Fletcher DeLancey

  Copyright © 2014 by Fletcher DeLancey. All rights reserved.

  First Smashwords Edition: April 2014

  All rights reserved. This eBook is licensed for the personal enjoyment of the original purchaser only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are a work of fiction or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Table of Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT FLETCHER DELANCEY

  OTHER BOOKS FROM YLVA PUBLISHING

  COMING FROM YLVA PUBLISHING IN 2014

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank to my beta readers, Alma, Caren, and Maria. Their input, both geeky and nongeeky, is always to the betterment of my writing. Special thanks to Maria for allowing me to share what was originally a story written just for her birthday. (“You should write a story about two women who meet in a coffee shop,” she said. “And one of them is using a Mac, the other a PC…”)

  Thanks also to Astrid and Jae, the dream team at Ylva Publishing. Astrid informed me that yes, a novella-length story certainly was publishable— particularly with Ylva!— and encouraged me to polish and update my tale for release into the wider world, while Jae helped with the polish and kept me honest regarding my various writing vices.

  DEDICATION

  To my favorite wife.

  CHAPTER 1

  Anna was a creature of habit. Every Saturday morning, sometime between nine and eleven a.m., she packed up her laptop in its case and walked to the Bean Grinder for her double caramel mocha and chocolate cherry scone—a travesty of sugar and empty calories, but one she simply could not live without. Though she always wished she could lose those last ten pounds, giving up her mochas and scones was too high a price to pay. She had compromised by limiting indulgences to once a week, and even that loss had been painful.

  The two-mile walk to the Bean Grinder enabled the happy delusion that she was burning off those calories before she even imbibed them. She did try to extend the walk somewhat by not taking the direct route, but Corvallis was a small town and there was only so far she could deviate before ending up in either the river on the east side or the state highway on the west. Today she was opting for the river route, which had the advantage of good bird-watching potential and the disadvantage of high skateboarder or rollerblader collision potential. Of course, if she made this walk two or three hours earlier, there would be more birds and fewer kids on various-sized wheels. But that would require getting up earlier. She worked the seven-to-four shift five days a week, and she’d be damned if she’d sacrifice a moment of sleep on her precious weekends.

  She swung along, her legs eating up more ground than most people expected of someone her height. For some reason, it never seemed to occur to them that shorter legs could move more quickly than longer ones. With every step her computer bag bumped her hip, its presence comforting as always. As long as she had the laptop and an Internet connection, she wasn’t alone.

  A group of kids whizzed by on their rollerblades, laughing and gossiping as they went. Anna smiled, watching as they sped around the curve of the river path and vanished from sight. She’d once been part of a group like that, a few hundred years ago. But that was back in her hometown, and it never seemed to be as easy to find social groups as an adult—at least not groups where everyone shared the same history, background, goals, and aspirations. Except her group hadn’t really shared the same aspirations. She was the only one who had left.

  Rounding the curve, she took the next right turn off the path and within a block was back in the business district. Two more blocks and a left turn and there it was, her favorite coffee shop in the whole world. With a gustatory tingle of anticipation, she opened the door and went straight to the counter.

  “Hi, Kyung. Are you ready for that chem test?” She pulled the laptop case over her head and deposited it on the floor at her feet.

  “Hi, Ms. Petrowski. Yeah, I’m ready. It’s not chem that worries me; it’s biology. Chemistry makes sense. Biology, you just have to memorize everything. The usual?”

  “Please.” She watched as he pulled a small covered plate out from under the counter, winking at her as he did so.

  “Saved it for you,” he said in a near-whisper. “We had a run on ’em half an hour ago. I could tell they were going to vanish.”

  Indeed, the space in the glass display reserved for her favorite pastry was empty.

  “You are a god among students and men,” she said, happily drawing the scone closer to her body. “Now if we could only get you to call me Anna, you’d be perfect.”

  He smiled, his teeth flashing white against his dark face as he pulled a mug from the stack. “No can do. Someday you’ll quit trying.”

  “That would mean giving up, and I never give up.” It was an old game between them, and she was probably never going to win. Kyung had been raised by a fiercely polite mother, whom Anna knew through her IT work on campus. Mrs. Choi was a tiny woman, making Anna look like a Viking by comparison, but her force of personality was such that people’s spines unconsciously straightened around her. Anna could only imagine what it had been like to grow up under her watchful eye.

  Kyung efficiently whipped up her caramel mocha and set it on the counter. “There you go. One double shot of caffeine, with sugar drip. Would you like an IV with that?”

  She laughed as she handed over a five-dollar bill. “If only I could. Keep the dollar, Kyung.”

  “Thanks, Ms. Petrowski.”

  “Call me Anna and that tip could be a lot more.”

  He looked wounded. “Now you’re resorting to bribery?”

  “Would it work?”

  “No.”

  “Then I guess I’m not resorting to it.” She settled the laptop case over her head again, picked up the coffee in one hand and the scone in the other, and turned to look for a table.

  She was on the early end of her usual arrival time, which meant there were more tables available. Unfortunately, her favorite one in the corner was occupied by a woman peering intently at her laptop while sipping from an immense travel mug. Anna frowned, then walked to the next table over. Here she could still be by the windows, and the moment the other woman left, she would scoot into her favorite spot.

  She sat down, opened her laptop, and began the next part of her Saturday routine: catching up on the pleasure reading she didn’t have time for on weeknights. This was usually a two-hour process, and one she looked forward to. In the IT world, if you didn’t keep up, you were soon obsolete. So she spent hours at work and afterwards reading about software updates, hardware advances, networking solutions, creative problem-solving techniques, and every other thing that kept her on top of her profession. But on the weekends, she didn’t want anything to do with computers other than using hers as a reading platform. This was her time to catch up on world news, some politics—though her tolerance threshold for that was very low—a little entertainment gossip, and her favorite thing, travel blogs. She loved to read
about faraway places and had a running list of the top ten locations she wanted to visit someday. On her salary, a few of those locations were probably out of the question, but she could still dream.

  At the moment, she was reading obsessively about Portugal. One of her coworkers had recently returned from a European tour and raved about how Portugal was the last place in western Europe where one could travel without selling a kidney to finance the trip. Always alert for frugal traveling options, Anna had seized upon the idea and begun researching. What she’d read had piqued her interest, and at the moment, Portugal was sitting at the top of her list. She also liked the fact that Spain could be easily added to the itinerary, and was giving serious thought to a quick side trip to Gibraltar. And from there—holy moly, she could hop a ferry to Tangier and actually set foot in Africa.

  She was just checking out the ferry routes when a voice next to her said, “Shit!”

  Anna raised her head and glanced over at the woman who had usurped her table. As their eyes met, the woman’s cheeks pinked. “Sorry,” she said in an embarrassed tone. “I didn’t mean to say that out loud.”

  Nodding, Anna returned her attention to the ferry schedules. Hm, there was a shorter ferry route from Tarifa, Spain, to Tangier. But she really wanted to see Gibraltar. Maybe she could take a bus to Gibraltar, then return to Tarifa and hop the ferry from there? Would the fare difference be worth it?

  “Are you kidding me? Dammit!”

  Anna looked up in time to see the woman deliver a sharp smack to the side of her laptop’s screen.

  “I hate these things,” she growled. This time when she met Anna’s eyes, her ire had clearly overtaken her embarrassment. “All I want is to finish this report and save the edits; is that so much to ask?”

  “Given the computer you’re using, it probably is.” Anna smiled in spite of herself. She’d pegged the woman as a computer twit the moment she’d seen the machine on her table. “Twit” was the slang term in her department for the high-powered people on campus who demanded the latest and most expensive computers despite having no actual need for them. They were a funding drain in every department’s budget, but no one ever thought of cutting their equipment line item. Instead, it always seemed to be cut for the research assistants and admin assistants who actually needed the processing power.

  A cool brown gaze rested on her. “This is supposed to be the best computer out there. How can I be asking too much of it?”

  “Who told you to buy that model? Your admin?”

  “No, my—” She paused, scratched the side of her forehead with a long finger, and finished, “My friend. Who, now that I think about it, doesn’t know jack shit about these things, and I have no idea why I listened to her.” Sharp eyes scanned Anna’s computer and lifted to her face. “Apple? Are you one of those Mac bigots?”

  It was insulting on the surface, but there was a trace of humor in the woman’s face that allowed Anna to relax. “Guilty as charged. Worse, I’m a knowledgeable Mac bigot. That makes me dangerous.”

  “Knowledgeable, how?”

  Damn. She hadn’t meant to put herself in that corner. With a sigh, she said, “I work for the IT department on campus.”

  And there it was, the look she recognized so easily. The you can save me expression that meant she was about to face a choice: either be rude to salvage her morning, or be polite and give up her precious weekend time to do yet another computer intervention. In Anna’s experience, computer techs had one thing in common with doctors and lawyers, and it wasn’t the salary. It was that everyone thought her advice came free, even on weekends.

  “Do you think you could—?” The woman stopped herself again. “I’m sorry. You’re here trying to relax, aren’t you? I shouldn’t be horning in. By the way, I’m Elizabeth Markel.” She leaned out of her chair and held out a hand.

  Anna reached over to take it. “Anna Petrowski. Nice to meet you. And thanks for not asking me to fix your problem.”

  “Just because I’m working on a Saturday morning doesn’t mean everyone should.” She glanced at Anna’s laptop again. “You’re IT, but your personal computer is a Mac? I thought everyone in IT used PCs.”

  “Which IT department are you talking about? The one I work for wishes the whole campus would switch to Macs. It would make our lives a hell of a lot easier.”

  “Really? I guess I’m talking about my old IT department. I’m new here. Just came over from Michigan State.”

  “That’s kind of a step down in size, isn’t it?”

  “In student body, yes. But it’s a step up for me personally. I’d hit the ceiling in Michigan.”

  Anna nodded her understanding. It was a fact of university life that one often stood a better chance of promotion by leaving than by expecting recognition where one was. The IT world was a little different and somewhat immune to that rule, but she’d seen many campus acquaintances transfer out in order to advance. “Well, in that case, welcome to the land of the Beavers.”

  “Thanks.” Elizabeth’s sudden smile was blinding. “And can I just tell you that your choice of mascot gave me serious pause? I wasn’t sure the promotion made up for going from being a Spartan to being a Beaver.”

  “Could be worse. You could be a Duck,” said Anna, naming the mascot of their rival state university.

  “Believe me, I know. What is it with Oregon mascots, anyway? Don’t you have bears here? Cougars? Wolves? Something a little more impressive?”

  “Tons of bears, but how common is that? Montana, Missouri, Northern Colorado, the University of California system—there are bear mascots everywhere. We’d rather be original. The Cougars are Washington State. And ranchers shot the last of our wolves sometime before World War Two. Every now and then one wanders over from Idaho, and the whole eastern half of the state wants to pick up their rifles and take care of it.”

  “Yes, I’d heard this was still the Wild West.” Elizabeth’s eyebrows waggled a bit, and Anna couldn’t help but laugh.

  “I hate to say this, but you’ve got Easterner stamped all over you.”

  “Only someone on the West Coast would think that Michigan is ‘east.’ You do realize that there are several states between us and the Atlantic.”

  “Yes, but you’re in the Eastern time zone,” Anna pointed out.

  “Oh, for God’s sake. That’s how you determine who’s east?”

  “Actually, no. We think anyone on the other side of the Rockies is an Easterner.”

  Elizabeth, who had looked satisfied a moment earlier, now burst into laughter. “Well, that explains a lot.”

  It was the laughter that decided her. Anna gestured toward the recalcitrant laptop and said, “Would you like me to take a look?”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “I wouldn’t offer if I did. I’d make you fill out a service request instead.”

  “And that is universal no matter which campus you’re on.” Elizabeth scooted her chair aside to make room for Anna, who got up and slid into the chair next to her.

  “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here,” she said, angling the laptop for a better view. “Ah. Microsoft Word. Another bane in our lives.”

  “And a big one in mine, too, believe me. But what other option is there?”

  “Oh, please. For what you’re doing here? Practically any word-processing program. These charts aren’t even linked, are they?”

  Elizabeth looked blank. “I don’t know what you just asked.”

  “I mean, you don’t have them set to automatically update when the original Excel file is changed.”

  “I can do that?”

  Anna shook her head. “Oh boy. Yes, you can, but if you want me to teach you that, you will have to fill out a service request.” She scrolled up and down the page. “What exactly is the problem? It looks normal to me.”

  “The problem is that the damn thing crashed, and when I reopened it, it was the old version. None of my changes were saved.”

  Anna hid a smile. “They p
robably were; you just didn’t know where to look for them. Word does do autosaves, but the files are somewhat…difficult to find.” She opened up the file explorer window, clicked through several folders and subfolders, checked the modification date of a file, and then opened it. “Is that what you were looking for?” she asked, angling the computer back toward Elizabeth.

  After quickly scanning up and down, Elizabeth smiled. “Yes! God, thank you! How’d you do that?”

  “I just pulled it out of the temp directory. That’s one of the two places that Word automatically puts its autosave files.”

  “Can you show me how to find them?”

  “Sure.” Anna slid her chair a little closer so that they could both see the screen. “Go to documents and settings, then click on your user name, then click on local settings, and then click on the temp folder. The autosaved files are the ones with this .asd extension.”

  Elizabeth scowled at the screen. “You must be joking. How am I supposed to remember all that? Why doesn’t Word save those files in a location where you don’t have to be an IT specialist to find them? And what the hell is an .asd file? I thought Word documents were .doc files. Well, .docx now.” She rolled her eyes. “Every time you get used to something, they change it.”

  “Word documents are .docx files, yes. But Word doesn’t see this as a document; it sees it as a temporary file. It won’t be a document until you manually save it again. Ordinarily, you’d never even have to look for this, because Word is supposed to automatically bring up the most recent .asd file when it restarts after a crash.”

  “But sometimes it doesn’t.”

  “Right. And then you have to know where to look for it.”

  “Arrrgh.” Elizabeth buried her face in her hands, rubbed briskly, then looked up again. “Where do I sign up for your class?”