A pastor once said his job was to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. Thus we have the difference between a real live pet and an inanimate electro-mechanical object - in this case the personal computer. The pet comforts while the computer, improperly used and/or over used, is a thief and a murderer.

Besides, the computer, especially if you run a Microsoft Operating System and Microsoft production software, requires much more maintenance than does a pet. This alone is enough to drive most users' blood pressure through the roof. How many times do you suspect that needs to happen before it begins to take a toll on the human body? It is even more aggravating than the days when we only received three (3) snowy channels on a small black and white television and each channel required another trip outside in the

rain, in the cold, in the snow, in the heat to adjust the huge antenna attached to a corner of the house which spilled the rain directly into your face as you looked up to see in which direction the antenna was pointing. If you were lucky someone was in the house calling to you when you got the best picture.

You know what I am talking about... like when your computer locks up with a box popping up on the monitor's screen saying it needs to restart now, and won't let you do anything else until you acquiesce and reboot. There goes your last few minutes of work. Another blood pressure jump! It sure is for the Tennessee Mountain Man!

Father may know best, but mother knows even better and she always made the children set across the room from the TV concerned about it ruining their vision. Now that same mom allows the children and grandchildren to set on top of a twenty-one (21) inch monitor, even closer to a laptop, and play games ad infinitum. The result being more and more of our children are wearing glasses and contact lenses at younger and younger ages.

Mom also insisted that little ones spend much more time outside playing in the yard than obsessing over the magic box in the corner, and the children were healthier. There were fewer cases of childhood diabetes and hardly any childhood obesity.

Children learned skills greater than cheating x-box and PSP, and mom and pop never heard of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. The computer man and everyone else is seemingly required to work on or at computer consoles to some extent these days. As a result, the entire family now either suffers from a computer related ailment or is at real risk of developing one.

With the advent and prevalence of the personal computer and gaming gizmos, the heart, which is a muscle, gets little or no exercise. As if the TV did not create enough couch potatoes resulting in what amounts to atrophy of the heart muscle, the PC seems to have claimed the remainder of man.

A computer cannot hold you on cold nights or enjoy a walk hand-n-hand with you in the moonlight. It cannot comfort you when you are sick or improve your mood when you are sad. It cannot feed you when you are hungry nor give you a drink when you are thirsty... at least not yet. The PC cannot yet carry on a civil or reasoned conversation. Irrespective of one's addictions and all the attractions on the internet, it is not true social interaction and it certainly cannot satisfy the libido try as some may.

Used improperly it can and does drive wedges between husbands and wives, and between children and parents. Like a drug, once addicted, and it is addictive, it can cost one his job and it has. Like a nosy gossiping neighbor or ticked off lover, it has the propensity to tell the world (friend and foe alike) everything it knows (both good and bad) about you. And, in case you didn't know, there are hackers from people with malicious intentions, to your employer, to Microsoft, to insurance companies, to financial institutions, to the government who have the ability to ask your computer what it knows about you whenever they wish. And, your computer... your friend in whom you confide everything, like a spurned lover is more than willing to betray her paramour and spill her guts literally.

My computer... my friend? With such friends who needs enemies?

If you don't know how to protect yourself from a gabby computer you might want to seek the help of professionals like the folks at Remote Helpdesk 1. Now shut the glib computer down, and go outside and play.