At this moment, I’m installing Adobe’s Creative Suite onto my new Mac Mini, and while that’s happening, I’m on my PC and writing here. My KVM switch is now very happy to be so simultaneously occupied, and I am so happy in a stunned I-can’t-believe-it way to have a PC and a Mac that are both truly mine. The hand-me-downs before these two computers were like orphan children I’d adopted, and while I loved them and helped them realize their full potential, it’s nice not to have to deal with the little bits of baggage they had from their past.

I remember a writer from my old day job who somehow managed to inherit the big boss’s G4. His Mac was always acting up, freezing, and shutting down, and he couldn’t figure out why. He theorized that it was because it once belonged to the boss, who had odd ways of doing things, and even after our resident Mac expert cleaned it out and installed everything anew, those little computer quirks, those ghosts in the machine would pop up and harass our poor writer in the middle of his work. It didn’t matter what he did or didn’t do to it, its neuroses gained from its past were unavoidable, and that drove him bats.

I was lucky. Every orphan computer I’ve ever had was pretty well behaved. I don’t know if that speaks well of the previous owners, of me, or of both, but I’m very grateful.

Now … back to installing software on my new Mac.

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