WE STAND ON GUARD FOR TEA
By Carrington Vanston - May 18, 2004
http://www.carringtonvanston.net/archives/on_guard_for_tea

I'm setting the Wayback Machine to July of 1999 to give you a copy of a column I wrote for a budding Canadian Macintosh magazine. The magazine quickly became a non-success, and only one issue made the newsstands. I was the guy writing the obligatory back page humor column, called Shut Down, and you'll see that this was back when I still used Canadian spellings with all their quirky extra vowels.

So let your mind drift back to the late 90s, when Macs were colorful and I called them colourful, as I tell you about the similarities between owning a Macintosh and being Canadian...

**We Stand On Guard For Tea**

This morning while eating my Crunchy O's (which are full of sugary goodness) I decided that I'm not going to tell you what type of computer I own. Not just yet. I will tell you that it's lime green and it's often hugged and cuddled by visitors to my office. In fact, my computer has been getting more affection at work than I have.

It's not that I'm disgruntled. I'm still just as gruntled as ever, perhaps even gruntlier, but it irks me that along with a sexier profile and new industrial lines my computer seems to have better chat-up lines that I do.

Sometimes I forget what a Big Deal it is that my lime green computer offers terrific ease of hues. The fact that my computer comes in colours has been making news, but when it and I are working at our best my computer is transparent to me. Its particular shade of fluorescent lime coordinates well with my wardrobe, which let's you know that I'm single, but the best thing a computer can be is invisible.

Speaking of backpacks (well, we will be speaking of backpacks, just wait for it) there's an interesting irony in these colourful invisible computers. Not as ironic as singing a Millie Vanilli song in a kareoke bar, but certainly the recommended daily irony allowance. When we're together, I take my computer for granted. It's when we're untogether that I remember what the Big Deal is, particularly when I'm using some other type of computer.

My lime green computer is a tool that makes me more productive. I write better with it, I keep in touch with distant friends more easily and more cheaply, and I helped Mr. Nukem protect our planet against the evil aliens bent on kidnapping our women. Yes, that was me and the Duke.

But it's just a tool. Like a hammer, only more diverse in function. A Swiss Army hammer. Hammers are great tools: a design which lends itself to improvisation and experimentation, and a completely intuitive interface. No manual required. That's a good thing. The larger the instruction manual, the poorer the design.

My computer came with the smallest, thinnest manual of any computer I've ever owned. It also came with a set of stickers featuring cute catchy phrases and photos of other people's computers. I knew they weren't pictures of my computer, because my computer gets that red eye thing in photos.

I like the stickers. Apple has been distributing stickers with their computers since the dawn of time, which was roughly the mid-Eighties according to the Abbreviated Timeline of Historical Events which came free inside my box of Crunchy O's (which are full of sugary goodness). I'm glad that in all this time Apple has stuck with the stickers.

I find some other Apple traditions for computer packaging less appealing, like using Styrofoam shards that look like pieces from a Dali designed Tetris game and which once removed expand to exactly one centimetre wider than the box they came in. Apple's online registration is a big improvement over the tradition of including registration cards which lumped all computers newer than a decade old into an "other" category. It's disconcerting to buy a top of the line Power Mac only to find Apple listing their products as Mac II, Performa, Classic, and Other. At least we got a free gift for registering. Funny how my subscription to A+/Insider never showed up.

The Apple stickers never caught on the way I would have expected, particularly with Canadian Mac users. I would have thought I'd see them plastered all over the country. The stickers, that is, not the Canadians. I see the Canadians plastered everywhere.

Maybe the stickers are too tame. The stickers which shipped with my lime green computer were nice, but where are the "Once you go Mac you'll never go back" stickers? Where are the "1984: the number of the best" stickers and the "Real men only need one button" stickers?

I would have thought that those of us who use Macs in the land where metric rules the rulers would take to the stickers like water takes to a fish. I base this opinion on our what we wear when we travel.

When Canadians travel to other countries we become superpatriots, able to leap reasonable hand drawn facsimiles of tall buildings in a single bound. Or maybe a double bound after a big lunch. As the epitome of patriotism our backpacks (told you!) are covered in Canadian flag patches, Canadian flag pins, Canadian flag doodles, and the complete text of both the Familiar Classic and the Exciting New versions of our national anthem in neat cursive. We even start using "eh" as if it was a punctuation mark.

Back at home at hockey games we mumble the first eight words of our anthem before lapsing into lip synch. We're talking about our national anthem at our national pastime: Millie Vanilli on a kareoke machine indeed. But when in other countries we are patrioteers.

Canadians have it so good that our country becomes invisible to us most of the time. So it is with Mac users. Our computers, lime green or otherwise, work well enough that we forget what the Big Deal is. But send us into the world of other computers and out come the Apple stories and the Apple bragging, the Apple patches and pins and doodles. Those other places and other computers remind us just how good we've got it.

There is a lesson to be learned here: don't expect to pass a history exam by cheating off the free Abbreviated Timeline from a box of Crunchy O's (which are full of sugary goodness). There might even be another lesson, maybe something like style sells but substance sustains. But since I never got my subscription to A+/Insider, I ain't telling.

Carrington Vanston
carrington@carringtonvanston.net

[This article is released to the public domain.]