That’s it!

I’m unplugging this thing, opening the window, and chucking our personal computer right out the third-floor window.

Goodbye, good riddance.

We don’t have one of those fancy-Dan type of units which, for example, lets you use your phone at the same time you’re on your computer.

We have the early-type ‘dial-up’ system which means you’re fairly limited in what you do.

The phone thing is quite a nuisance. If I’m out on one of my walks, driving about town, or off to the store for a quart of whatever, I can assume I’m incommunicado in terms of reaching my personal headquarters, or quite simply home.

I’ll explain.

The minute I’m out the door, everything stops in the Swain domicile.

The apple pie sits on the counter to be finished later, the dusting of the furniture gets put on hold, planning for dinner comes to a screeching halt, and should the house decide to catch fire, I’m pretty sure my better half’s attitude would simply be … burn, baby, burn!

I’ll tell you why. She’s on the computer, chatting away with her sister in Ottawa, looking up a recipe on Aunt Mollie’s Golden Oldies, checking the weather projection for our summer vacation in 2014, playing bridge against a raft of other computer buddies, playing solitaire by herself … and this in just the first 15 minutes.

I’d need the rest of the space in this newspaper to even give you a glimpse of what she gets up to.

This is why I’ve just about given up trying to call home when I go out the door.

So that’s it. I’ll finish this column, open the window, warn folks below, and wham … out she goes. (the computer, not my wife).

Well, maybe I should just hold on a minute.

After all, the recipes she picks up make for extremely pleasant times at the table. The weather information lets us choose the ‘perfect weather’ for our vacation. The fact she’s chatting with her sister is really a good thing, because her sister’s a pretty good influence (at times). We save a lot of change in stamps which I can joyfully (on the odd occasion) fritter away at the casino, and, I really have to admit I do enjoy playing on the darn thing myself every once in a while.

The best thing for me is the fact I can make a mistake or choose to re-write a thought for this column by simply deleting the offending words and replacing them with others (which might be equally as bad, but the computers’ wizardly ways let me fool myself into thinking they’re absolutely brilliant).

I remember vividly when I used to write material using an electric typewriter.

Those machines were absolutely great, but I couldn’t stand having a typo or a mistake on the paper.

As a result, I’d go through gallons of white-out corrective stuff or hundreds of sheets of those little white correctional strips that let you mask a mistake and type over them.

I guess the conclusion I’m coming to is not to heave the computer out the window.

This old machine will keep me busy, until we can order one of the new types I’m sure is on a drawing board somewhere. It will be the kind you needn’t pound away on a keyboard to form the words; you’ll simply say them into a microphone and the computer will take over from there.

What we’re going to have to do, though, is have a shotgun beside us as we operate these things, and the minute we see that glint on the screen which hints they’re going to declare us obsolete – BLAM! – we show ‘em who’s really in charge.