I’m going to detail every hard crash Panther has and especially if it’s a new one. Tonight I saw a new kind of crash, one that has only been described to me by my friend Scott. Now I can attest firsthand that this crash creature exists.

I woke up my iMac from sleep, which is very normal and typical for me. That is, I never shut my iMac down unless I’m going to move it to a new power source. Why should I be afraid of sleep mode when I’m running the uncrashable (cough, cough) Mac OS X?

So I woke it up. And it died. With a message. It said, in like five languages, “You need to restart your computer.” To which I feel like responding, “You need to @#$@! function properly.” I am so intolerant of this nonsense since Jaguar! I’m realizing, with increasing chagrin, just what a pinnacle of stability Jaguar was. I’m not ready to downgrade yet, but another dozen of these pie-in-the-face crashes and I will be.

They tried to be nice about it. The “blue screen” (a pie by any other name is still a pie) was a tasteful eggshell-white text on a charcoal background, overlaid on a gently blackened view of my previously functional desktop. It’s like one of those cultured Bond villains saying “You’re going to die very unpleasantly now, Mr. Bond,” in a mellifluous and perfectly cultivated British accent. Thanks, but it still makes me want to kill the bad guy in revenge.

Well, when life hands you a frozen mouse pointer, you press the hard reset key like every other Joe Windows on the face of this crusty planet. Gads, but this is hard to swallow. All I can do is dedicate myself to getting the Truth Out—I will document each and every such insult—and re-learn my save reflex.