Today's round of "Me against the Mac"¹ was a comprehensive victory for Steve Jobs. Fucker.

I have an ever-growing list of reasons why I hate Macs, and I'll get it out any time someone's stupid enough to bring up the platform debate.² To such classics as "G4s don't have mechanical CD drive overrides" and "no way to interfere with a looping process", I have a new addition³:

The undeletable file.

For starters, he's invisible. And to the best of my knowledge there is no way to actually view invisible files on a Mac. You can do a search for them, which is what I ended up doing.

Then I dragged him to the trash. Since this seemed to have no effect on him whatsoever, I did it another six times. I hit delete, though with little expectation of anything happening, since the delete button on a Mac keyboard is pretty much cosmetic. I right-clicked⁴ and told it to "move to Trash", but apparently it didn't feel like it. So I right-clicked and selected⁵ the option "destroy".

Still nothing happened.

I did consider setting fire to the machine - always at the bottom of any trouble-shooting guide I author - but while it seemed likely to solve that particular problem, it didn't do much for the other problems I had.

Gosh. I must be getting soft in my old age.

What I can't figure out is whether it won't delete because it's invisible, or it won't delete because it is TRYING TO DRIVE ME TO MURDER.

Obviously, I suspect the second option. This is, after all, a Mac.

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1 It's like Britney's "Me against the Music", except the help desk is never staffed by Madonna and I get to wear more clothes. The dancemoves, however, are exactly the same.
2 I freely admit that most of the reasons I hate them don't apply to people who aren't using them to produce 23987-imaged high-resolution book files.
3 He might be new, but watch this guy, he's going places!
4 Yes, OK, "right-clicked", using ctrl-click, because Mac mouses (mice?) are also retarded.
5 With some trepidation, I might add, considering a few years back a colleague managed to delete the operating system off one of our office Macs without the machine so much as suggesting it might be a bad idea.

New cat-names suggestion for the list: "Hurry Up" and "Wait".

In one of those strange cases of coinciding rhythms, I've been made an ancillary element to a friend's quarter-life crisis. Barely three weeks after Anthony said, "You're going to need to get a proper job," Steph and Dani are off in New York and I'm temping for the government. There's amusement in trying to shoehorn one of the less conventional working histories into a temp agencies only-work-in-IE boxes. There's even more amusement in hearing that one's references are being checked after one's already taken up the position.

The temporary thing is strange. I want to be considered a resource - an item of applied, if advanced, stationery - and thus be efficient and impersonal. On the other hand, I'm probably going to be out of here in two weeks, so if I add whimsical notes to the business items going out (just to the team!) does it really matter?

I've never had a problem being strange. I have often had difficulties making sense to people not currently on the right wavelength. I'm trying to be restrained. I haven't made any Anthony-esque "you're an open action item" responses.

Yet.

The real fun, of course, comes when I have to administer these professional fora thingies. "Have you taken minutes before?" Steph asked, as she was inducting me.

"Well," I said. "Not of anything that didn't involve copious consumption of alcohol."

Anthony: *looks at the book I'm reading* So is that, like, the fourth one in the series, after Ultimatum?
Me: Yeah. This is the one where Matt Damon dresses up in drag.