Mac Rights, Now!

My Mac has no rights at this university. I, and 75% of Mac users at campus Gambelas (out of my sample size of 4), are on a virtual no-fly list. We are thinking about forming a student group, my MacBook and I. We will do this despite the threat of a potentially violent response from some well-organized concerned parents association who fear the influence of an alternative informatics lifestyle just when their young adult children have finally settled comfortably into their PC nests.

(below: my little white friend afloat in a PC sea)

This Mac no-fly list results in only very limited use of the web. We are unable to connect to outside servers to receive email from Eudora or any other email application, to download music from legitimate sources, use a Java application to upload photos to personal galleries, or run an automatic search for a location on Google Earth. Instead, we brave rebels are forced to recall from the depths of our grade school memories, more or less where Milan is (that country that looks like a boot, right?), scroll east in its general direction (if your default setting is the States at least), then close your eyes and hope that the blind click lands somewhere within zooming-in range of your target. Where is technology when we must rely on manual scrolling?!

As PC users effortlessly log on with smug smiles, we are forced to use (gasp!) web-based email. The sweet sweet sound of new email notification chimes are sadly only a distant memory for me now, as is the tantalizing sight of the loading bar filling up with the electric blue of all my unread mail.

Fellow rebel Mac user and Mac support group vice president hopeful, Regina, reported that she cannot even search for prices on lab supply websites. I ask you, how many PCR tubes, pipette tips and small vials of Taq must go to less deserving PC users before we act?

Should I simply adapt? Should I just accept that every luxury I have back home is not available to me when I travel to foreign countries? Well, that wouldn’t be very American now, would it? Shouldn’t I instead organize a protest, form an international coalition and help Mac users of all origins (at least the ones in my immediate vicinity) rise up and fight for a true informatics democracy? And if the very Mac users I try to help, actually resist, shouldn’t I hire U.S. protest contractors to infiltrate the computer technician’s desk and student body at Gambelas, with the veiled goal of instigating civil unrest to unseat the PC hold. Oh, I can almost here those sweet Eudora chimes right here from my lab table. This could be a glorious revolution…

Or, maybe I’ll just ride my bike to the internet café down the road….