
A discussion on how home computers destroy marriages.

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         "THE STATE OF SOME MARRIAGES IS TERMINAL"
                         by Art Buchwald
                   with revisions by A. Non O'Mus


     For every home computer sold in America, there is a
computer widow somewhere.  I dropped over to see the Bengals
the other night.  Mrs. Bengal offered me a drink.
     "Where's Walter?" I asked Adele.
     "Where he always is these nights.  He's in the library
talking to his home computer."
     "He talks to a computer?"
     "All the time.  It's taken the place of television,
conversation and everything else," she said bitterly.
     "I didn't know Walter was into computers."
     "That's all he's into.  As soon as he finishes dinner,
he leaves the table and says, 'Well, I've got to go in and
program a new household fiscal budget for the last half of 1988.'"
     "At least he's working to save you money."
     "He says he's working on a new budgeting spreadsheet, but I
walked in last night and he was playing 'Star Trek.'  He told me he was
just checking out his new hard disk drive.  I've never felt so
alone in my life.  At least when he watched baseball I could
sit next to him.  But now that he has a home computer he
says he has to be alone with his software."
     "You poor kid.  Maybe he'll tire of it."
     "No way.  He reads computer magazines the way he used
to read 'Newsweek' and his idea of a perfect 10 is now a 640 K
Ram IBM Computer that will expand to 1.2 K megabytes and
produce a six-color high graphic screen resolution."
     "Has he told you this?"
     "No, but he talks in his sleep."
     "Well, at least he's not dreaming about another woman,"
I said.
     "I could compete with another woman," Adele said, "But
I can't compete with a computer.  We have no communication
any more.  The only language he uses is BASIC, PASCAL, PL/1 and
sometimes even FORTRAN.  I'm at my wits' end."
     "You're not thinking of leaving him?"
     "I threatened to last week and he said to hold off until
he could program all the variables, and come up with a
modified alternative."
     "Have you ever thought about getting your own home
computer and plugging into his?  Perhaps you could talk
that way over a modem connection."
     "I'm not interested in interfacing with him through a
terminal.  After all, we're in the same house."
     "Maybe I should talk with him," I suggested.
     "You can try, but I doubt if it will do any good."
     I went into the library and found Walter hunched over
his keyboard.  "Hi, Walter.  Am I disturbing you?"
     "No," he said, squinting at me.  "I was only just writing a
little program in PL/1."
     "How's life?" I asked.
     "Fine.  I was having a problem with my PL/1 print command for a
while, but I straightened it out by deleting a semicolon."
     "You have to be careful of those," I said.  "What
news of Adele?"
     "Wait a minute," he said, "I'll find out."
     He put in his database disk, ran it, and typed on the
screen ADELE.  Then he hit his RETURN button.
     "Here it is," he said.  "She's either in the kitchen,
the bath, her bedroom, or went to a baseball game."
     "A baseball game?"
     Walter looked worried.  "That doesn't sound right.  But
it's no problem.  All I have to do is hit this DELETE button."
     "Adele thinks she's losing you to this new hard disk
retrieval system," I told him.
     "That's ridiculous," Walter said.  "All I'm trying to
do is store and index data that will be able to forecast how
we can enjoy the September years of our life."
     "We've been friends for years, so I'm going to ask you
a very personal question, Walter.  How much do you love
Adele?"
     Walter, without saying a word, inserted a disk, and
started hitting the keyboard.
     "What are you doing?" I asked.
     "I'm counting the ways.  It's much faster to do it on
a computer."

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