Electra Revisited

Electra Revisited

As he left for work, my husband kissed me and said, “Goodbye…. Electra.”

He wasn’t thinking of Carmen Electra, the former Baywatch babe. He wasn’t referring to the fact that I once worked for an electrician. He wasn’t hinting about my electrifying personality, either. He didn’t mean the Electra complex from Freudian psychology or the Electra from Greek mythology. No, my husband was referring to another myth, the recent myth that my personal electrical system stops computers from working.

I once knew a girl who couldn’t wear wind-up wristwatches. They wouldn’t work on her wrist, though they would function perfectly on anyone else. She said it was her personal electricity. I only half believed her explanation then, and now a similar reputation threatens me.

My computer is in the computer hospital this week. I didn’t have anything to do with its demise. Only one year old, it started to spew peculiar error messages a few weeks ago. Often it “froze” in the middle of a very important research project (or a very important computer game). Then it became confused and didn’t recognize the scanner, the printer or my palm computer. Finally, it became paralyzed so that no amount of restarting, coaxing, banging keys, or banging heads could make it work.

Ironically, a similar problem happened exactly one year ago with my previous computer. And 18 months before that, another device mysteriously died on me. Perhaps not so ironically, this latest machine conked out a few days after the 1-year warranty expired. Coincidence or planned obsolescence? Murphy’s law states, “If something can go wrong, it will,” and sure enough, I had planned to spend the entire weekend working on various computer projects for both home and work.

We are a family with many technological options. We all have some degree of savvy with these electronic brains. While my husband busied himself trying to “recover” the information on my PC, I trotted downstairs to his laptop computer. All I needed was the word processing software. However, that particular program had disappeared from his machine. When I clicked on the icon, the message said that Microsoft WORD was no longer installed. Already frustrated with the machine upstairs, my husband came down to examine his laptop. He said, “WORD was just there! I know it was!”

Then he turned to me and asked suspiciously, “What did you do?”

Rather than dignify his question with a reply, I calmly retrieved the palm-sized computer from my briefcase. As I tapped the power button, the small screen in my hand lit up. And it didn’t move. It was “frozen.”

Was I inside a Stephen King novel?

Angry at inanimate objects, I drove to my office to finish my documents. On the way, I ran into a neighbor who asked if my husband or I knew how to install a scanner. “Uh, yes we do,” I said tentatively, “But this isn’t a good day to ask either of us about technology.”

Once inside my office, I discovered that the right button of the mouse on my office computer was disabled. I was becoming more unnerved with every minute. I kept expecting Rod Serling and Alfred Hitchcock to appear in the office doorway and say in unison, “We’ve been waiting for you, Suzy.”

Oh great, now I was hallucinating as well.

After finishing the documents, I returned home. My PC was beyond the scope of our skill, so we hauled it to the service center. My husband reloaded the laptop, I put new batteries in my palm unit, and I got another mouse at the office. None of these things was my fault. But my husband pondered that trouble with four machines in one morning was too much for mere coincidence. He suggested that my personal electricity caused the interference. It was a minor joke on the weekend.

But today, he called me “Electra.”

Freud’s Electra complex is about adolescent girls’ possessiveness toward fathers and hostility toward mothers. They get over it with age. The Suzy Wurtz Electra complex is about a middle-aged woman’s possessiveness toward computers and her hostility toward them when they inexplicably don’t work.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get over mine.

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