The Evil Spinning Rainbow Wheel

I have a Macbook. As many of you probably already know, owning a Mac is a key step in ruling people/feeling superior. So my brother and I both got one a few years ago. He named his Bernie and mine Miss Mary (wait for it... funny, right?)

Miss Mary and I have had some wonderful times. She lets me have iMovie, which I like to play with, she never gets a FB virus, and the little apple on the back is just plain uplifting. I'm also 99% sure Miss Mary is magical - a few weeks before Daniel and I got married, she got sick :( and the hard drive crashed - taking a ton of wedding details with it. I was very sad. I had loved Miss Mary the best way I knew how. In retrospect, letting her battery die constantly along with dropping her onto the concrete several times may have factored into her illness. We may never know.

BUT THEN my dad used some sort of computer voodoo and spoke to Miss Mary, and she heeded his call from the Motherboard in the Sky, and returned to me with all wedding-related things intact. Hooray for my dad and Miss Mary!

However, there is one trait of Miss Mary that she and I have faced off over many times: The spinning rainbow wheel. If you do not own a Mac, here's the skinny - when Miss Mary decides she is tired, or if she misses breakfast, or just generally wants to aggravate me to extreme levels, she employs the cruelest form of torture, which is the spinning rainbow wheel. The wheel means one thing and one thing only: You must wait. Do not ask how long or why, for these questions have no answers. Just wait. And grab a pop-tart because it could be a while.

I think a big part of my issue with the spinning wheel is that I can never figure out for the life of me why it decides to pop up. For instance, earlier today I was checking my email; I click on a FB email and lo and behold, the spinny rainbow comes out to play. It spun and spun and spun and spun and spun and spun. Then it stopped spinning. As far as I can tell, no changes or updates were made to the computer. The rainbow wheel, realizing it hadn't screwed with me for quite some time, just got tired of the lack of attention and popped up for 470385 minutes before disappearing again, lying in wait for the next inconvenient time to attack.

The other reason I don't like the spinning rainbow wheel of doom is because it's a RAINBOW. Rainbows are supposed to equal God's promises and happiness and unicorns and little tiny people dressed in green suits carrying pots of gold around. But Miss Mary uses the rainbow for dark, mean purposes, so not only is my work - okay, FB time - interrupted but I am momentarily excited to see a happy rainbow on my screen. That's not cool. If the rainbow isn't at least going to bring my computer shinier versions of Firefox or software updates or even a picture of a puppy, it should be changed to something unhappy so I know what to expect. Like a math problem, or Snooki, or a fire-breathing dragon that raps the wrong words to the Fresh Prince song. All these things would be annoying as heck and would better indicate that, far from the happy times expected, I will spend the next five minutes yelling at Miss Mary and tapping the keys incessantly.

I hate you, evil spinning rainbow wheel.