The guys on the Y2K Project used to laugh at me when I explained how computers work. It's gerbils. With flashcards. See for yourself if I'm not right. Turn on your computer and listen to the noises the CPU makes as it boots up. Watch the screens. When Windows comes up, that's the signal that the gerbils have gone back to sleep and the various computer Goddesses are now assuming control of your system. But the faithful and industrious gerbils were there when we needed them.
I have heard somewhere that there are two kinds of computer people. My friend Sandy is one kind. A self-confessed "Mac addict," she has every whiz-bang, bell, and whistle you can imagine on her system, and she is forever upgrading. In addition to the usual modem, fax, and scanner, she's got zip drives and graphics programs and screen savers that strut and blink and warble. She's got equipment I can neither imagine nor pronounce. She also has every game you've ever heard of, and she's good at all of them.
I am the other kind of computer person. To me, it's a machine, a tool. I write books with it. I don't trust it to balance my checkbook, I don't keep my credit or solstice card lists on it, and my organizer is a leather book I carry in my hands. Sure, I've got a modem, an external hard drive (but when I type, I keep leaving out the X, so it's really an eternal hard drive), a "soundblaster," and about two million fonts, but I'm not ensorceled by the computer. And I have never played a computer game. Well . . . that's not quite true. When my son was nine or ten, he and one of his friends vanquished me in a dozen successive games of "Pong," and I never could get the little Frogger across the street unscathed.
Sandy's Found Computer Goddess is Nerdix. Mine is Compuquia.
Nerdix is the Goddess of Serious Computing. She is the Mother of All Motherboards, ruler of servers, stacks, hubs, routers, multiplexers, modems, comm ports, packet analyzers, CD ROMs, ergonomic keyboards, and connectors and cables. Under Her watchful eyes we create our spreadsheets and databases, in the shadow of Her hands we put together our power presentations and multimedia extravaganzas. Those who worship Nerdix are able to read the technical manuals on the arcane, cutting-edge topics and actually understand them. And when their systems crash, they can do a lot more than just press ALT+CTRL+DEL. Nerdix's people don't really need an invocation-and wouldn't take the time to pronounce it anyway-but here's one just the same. Maybe it'll come in handy some time.
Yo! Bright Nerdix, hey, Ruggedized Lady,
Bump up my hardware this minute.
Tower and port, MUX, server, and drive-
Hey, Lady-put more power in it!
Compuquia (pronounced com-PUKE-ee-a), on the other hand, is my kind of computer Goddess. Modest and benevolent, She stays out of the way, merely whispering, "Call someone who knows," when I press or click and suffer unexpected consequences. Compuquia is not insulted by the dozens of glittery stickers around the frame of my monitor and on my mouse and the two foot-high stacks of books on the CPU. (She knows that that's what horizontal surfaces are for: stacking books.) Our Blessed Virgin Compuquia works invisibly, refreshing our monitors and saving our files before we press any fatal buttons. It is She who entices the bugs to feed somewhere else and has made Mouse (see below) our friend. She is the generous Goddess Who inspires the "for Dummies" series of computer books.
Compuquia's invocation is, accordingly, brief and simple:
Hail, Compuquia, You're the boss.
Open my Windows and manage my DOS.
She Who has specific care of our disk drives, both hard and portable, is the Queen of Disks, lovely dark-haired, red-robed lady Whom we can usually find sitting on a throne under a bower of roses and tenderly holding the Archetypal Disk in Her lap. The Queen of Disks is open and receptive, with a serious cast of intelligence and greatness of soul, and She is well known for her vast collections that forever spill out of their little plastic boxes and spread across desks everywhere.
Reader, I must confess that I am worried about the Queen's long-time companion, Mr. Floppy. Twenty-odd years ago, when I first met him, Mr. Floppy encompassed eight inches. Within a few years, however, he had shrunk to about five inches, and now he is even further diminished. At three and a quarter inches, he's not even floppy anymore. Poor Mr. Floppy! What is technology doing to him?
Note. The term Found Goddess was created by Morgan Grey and Julia Penelope for their wonderful book, Found Goddesses: Asphalta to Viscera (New Victoria Publishers, 1980). I started Finding goddesses-Nerdix, Compuquia, Hostilia, and Whizziwig-when I was working on a Y2K project for a major corporation. I Found the other goddesses described here when I was writing a book on the subject, Finding New Goddesses (ECW Press, 2003). The newest goddesses are Fubar-Ma and Linker Bell, who have just now appeared. Well, maybe they've been standing around and/or hovering; I just got them down on paper.
Barbara Ardinger, Ph.D. (www.barbaraardinger.com), is the author of Pagan Every Day: Finding the Extraordinary in Our Ordinary Lives (RedWheel/Weiser, 2006), a unique daybook of daily meditations, stories, and activities. Her earlier books are Finding New Goddesses, Quicksilver Moon, Goddess Meditations, and Practicing the Presence of the Goddess. Her day job is freelance editing for people who don’t want to embarrass themselves in print. Barbara lives in southern California. To purchase a signed copy of Finding New Goddesses, just send Barbara an email at bawriting@earthlink.net.