Soft 'wear' upgrade

By Seymour Cumming

An ex-pat friend of mine had his brain 'upgraded' recently. But, hell, it all went wrong. Poor bugger kept complaining that he was "overwhelmed by deep thinking, heavy and cumbersome philosophical reasoning and a sense of social conscience". It kept launching itself in a fresh window every time he read the Nation newspaper, so he decided it was time to downgrade to a simpler version.

Heck, the local operating system just couldn't cope with the complex software in his head. Time to go back to basics and re-format he reckoned. Now he's installed Thai thinking for ex-pats V1.2 and everything is a bit prozac but dandy. He laughs a lot, even at silly things, but by-and-large the old geezer's happy.

Happy that is, until he realised what had gone wrong. A major syntax error occurred during the diagnostics stage resulting in the most appalling mix-up. Software was confused and hardware substituted. Where once he had a stiffie drive he now has a floppy. He could've sworn he mumbled something about organ 'kamoeys' (robbers) as the anaesthetic kicked in but it must have come out all wrong. He's now a 'kratoey' (ladyboy)!

Crikey! His hard drive no longer works quite as it should - it's in there somewhere but he needs to unzip to find it. Never before has he been so unhappy with 'Micro'soft. The motherboard is terribly confused about his gender and the interface looks somewhat different. Strewth mate, I kid you not! The language has remained the same, but it comes out a little different.

And it gets worse, he no longer has an anti-virus checker and his e-mail has become fe-male. The instructions in Word are all in Thai and his Outlook isn't looking too Flash. His mind now spends quite a bit of time in Dreamweaver, Explorer no longer works, his PowerPoint looks completely different, and the volume control is now stuck on 'loud'.

Poor fella. He came to Thailand with plans to write a book. Now all he wants to do is play games and have 'sanook'. He particularly likes using his 'mouse', and prefers laptop dancing to doing it on a desktop.

Looking on the brighter side, however, he no longer needs a UPS (uninterruptible prostitute supply), his 'software' no longer 'hangs', pirate programs are abundant, internet pornography doesn't interests him as much, but he gets terribly depressed every time he reads one of those spam emails promising to 'enlarge his penis'.

Investigative-journalist-at-large, Seymour Cumming has previously been a used car salesman, fruit picker, 'shock jock' and newsroom war correspondent. He has written for Farmer's Weekly, Nyet!, Chessworld and Cross-stitching Magazine.

He's been to more than 50 countries, some for less than a day, and is currently working on a travel novel, but he's written the author's biog, and not progressed much beyond that. His controversial commentary on ex-pat life in Thailand appears in Chiang Mai City Life Magazine.