Dearest Martha,

It has been nearly sixty days since I crossed over the ocean and returned to my more design principled homeland on Macintosh. I sought no longer to be a voyager in unknown lands, a stranger amongst those who call upon the goddess Cortana, and sought peace and refuge here in a time of need.

But lo! This adjustment has not been easy, and it has not been “just works”, but fraught with much pain and consternation. Allow me to enumerate these small but compounding tribulations.

Firstly, I am simply awash in cables for which to charge and plug and unplug. Broken by my disorganization, I spoke with a man named Elgato and — for a handsome sum — purchased from him a curious device which reduces my cabling complications down to a single cord. But to my dismay, I still see rope upon rope unto which need to be managed. It is not a panacea. The device will occasionally malfunction leaving me without peripherals such as my much needed camera, darkening my avatar to colleagues in these strange times. Most annoyingly, I have discovered that if I route a cable to speakers from the rear of the device and connect analog headphones to front of the device, it will produce a hideous hum in the speakers, no doubt due to some grounding failure. Perhaps another gilded cable from the Amazon will solve this nuisance.

Secondly, my preferred scrolling device, a simple mouse, was pushed out by my own scroll-direction anxieties and I am forced to flail my fingers numbly and imprecisely over an enchanted TrackPad. This is fine as things go, but ergonomically produces a pain in my wrist. So I have constructed a tilted riser out of the children’s plastic bricks, which provides relief but has all the professionality of a bear in a hat and tie riding a bicycle.

Thirdly, these cursed sonic AirPods. They enjoy pairing with my telephone and enjoy pairing with my entertainment tablet, but they only produce aggravation when interfacing with the computer. If — on the rare occasion they are able to connect properly — I am to be interrupted by a person of this household whilst they are in use, which is oft the case during this awful pandemic, they refuse to acknowledge their previous pairing and authenticated handshake. It’s as if they have never met before, nay never existed! And please don’t get me started on receiving a phone call whilst connected to the computer, a disasterously clumsy process — forged by Lucifer himself — with a singular purpose to make me appear to be a common idiot when answering the telephone! It is so terrible I have given up on those blasted AirPods entirely and will spend the rest of my days suffering a dent in my scalp, what the children mockingly refer to as “headphone hair.”

Fouthly, is that most obvious of obstacles, Big Sur. This creature, whenever the wind blows and it decides to update, removes software I had previously installed from itself. Then it is up to me to reset or reinstall such software as needed. This is particularly confounding with my Rosetta Terminal being erased. I crafted the Rosetta Terminal because the various homebrews, nodes, and rubies were not immediately suited to the new architecture, and those cursed automata puppeteer and puppetter-core — which drove me to Macintosh in the first place! — they require the ancient technologies to function. Behold! When I update the system, my precious and needed Rosetta Terminal is erased and git must be installed entirely via xcode-select. Like Sysiphus, I return to pushing the boulder up the hill.

It is bittersweet possessing modern things but having old, tired problems. Perhaps the frustrations of technology is a curse we cannot escape. It seems overwhelming that peripherals in the land of Macintosh are an afterthought. A manicured and controlled piece of hardware unable to interface with the world outside. A sad story, if it were to be written.

Sadly, I must go now and cut this communique short. The sprint is ending soon and I will have two days respite before beginning anew. The children have asked that I assist their friend Luigi clear his mansion of ghosts and ghouls. Such imagination! Best wishes, I hope you are well, and an invitation to be vaccinated arrives on your doorstep soon.

Your sincerely,

David