Mission: Inaccessible

Well, I'm in Vicenza, Italy for my first week. The order of business is pretty cut and dry when you arrive at a new place:

1. Check into hotel.

2. Look for a car.

3. Look for a house.

4. Move in.

5. Let boxes sit around your new house because by the time you finally get everything unpacked, you're going to have to move again.

That last one isn't really the case, but it feels like it sometimes.

Currently, I'm on steps 2 and 3. They're going slowly, but going never-the-less. There are a couple of cars here at Ederle that I'm eyeballing. One is a older Mercedes and the other is old style Mk III classic Mini. Both pretty cool and euro-trashy, which is what I'm going for.

As it happens, Jessica and Aidan aren't here with me. They had to wait in the US to get their Italian visas straightened out, so I'm here unaccompanio. As I have been looking at cars, I've been taking pictures so that I can email them back to Jessica so she can see them.

So I take my camera to the library to try and upload the pictures on Photobucket so she can see the cars that I'm checking out. But of course the public computers at the library won't connect to my camera since they're restricted because the Army is terrified that someone might look at a naked woman. But they do have a CD ROM. So off I go to the Photo mat.

The Photo place wants $7.00 to burn my pictures to a CD. Hells to the nah, sez I. Got to find a better way to do it. I'm scratching my head for a bit and I wonder into the electronics store. As I'm looking around and thinking, I see all the new, shiny computers set out for display on the floor. They're all up and running. And none of them have any accessibility restrictions.

I buy a small pack of blank CDs ($5) and leave the store to prepare. I take out one CD and attach the USB cable to my camera while placing it in my camera bag with just the end of the cable exposed. Then it's off to the store for Mission: Inaccessible. I sidle up to one of the new machines and stick my throbbing camera cable into the eager USB slot on the front of the computer. Jackpot. The computer recognizes my camera without a hitch, and within 5 minutes I've pulled off the pictures that I need and burned them to CD. I made it out without disturbing the crowd of kids that had gathered next to where I was to watch "Disney's The Shaggy Dog". Tim Allen, have you no shame?

Then it was off to the library where I was sure that my CD would let me access my pictures on the hopelessly crippled public computers. After waiting for a free computer to open up, I realize that all the computers have been replaces with new black Dell computers. "Shouldn't affect me," thought I. But no, it did. When they upgraded the computers, they must have configured Windows to be even more inaccessible. You can't even click on a My Computer icon. The CD drive wasn't even recognized. My mission... had failed.

Now my only recourse is to go out into the Italian economy and try to find an internet cafe or some such establishment to upload my pictures. Is this worth it? What's with the crippled computers? Are we so terrified that some kid is going to look at a boob? Or are we really worried that some terrorist is going to send messages to Al Queda at the Army library in Italy? Maybe I'm naive, but it just seems a little like overkill.