Work Text:
It was a Tuesday in July, and that meant warm weather, lots of sun, and the perfect time to get outdoors.
Which is why Linda took the perfect opportunity to usher her siblings outside for a game of hide and seek at the shout of "Oh, COME ON!" muffled from upstairs.
'Is papí gonna be alright?' Bendy tugged on her shirt, signing with heavy pauses. Her brother's worries weren't unfounded, granted their father's poor health record.
"Papí just needs some time to focus, we can bring him something from the garden to boost his spirits."
He seemed to perk up at that, and skittled after his siblings.
Upstairs, meanwhile, the only thing boosting was the trajectory at which Jo was about to throw his keyboard out the window.
"WHAT DO YOU MEAN SYSTEM PERMISSION? I OWN YOU!"
Once again, he opened the advanced settings, pinching his nose in frustration as he misclicked the wrong advanced settings button. No, he didn't want to archive anything, he just wanted to change file permissions. Move some stuff to your other drive, they said! It'll free up space, they said! God, he should have just been a cartoonist. Wait a minute, he did that once already! It was awful! Maybe Ray would let him be a house-husband? Just for today, when he was done with this.
He looked back at his J drive. J for Johan. J for "I Just wanna clear space off of you PLEASE". Had he even made any progress on it? He clicked the window. Thirteen-point-six zedronobytes free out of...well that was better than the eighty ronobytes he'd been stuck with just this morning. If he was lucky, he could get it up to, say, twenty or twenty-five and get back down to the studio within the next half hour. Technology could suck a lemon. He'd rather be doing anything other than this. Watching grass grow or ink drying would have been more satisfying than the fifth message in a row popping up: access denied.
"No, YOU'RE DENIED!!! Stupid p-piece of garbage...". He grumbled under his breath, mouse clicking intermittently as he worked.
"Admin permission, did that...okay...what—DAMMIT! WHO THE HELL IS SYSTEM? I D-DON'T—I—"
He dissolved into agitated syllables at this point, slapping his hands down on the desk. Giving administrators full control wasn't enough to override it apparently. Advanced settings again. File owner. SYSTEM?
"I'll b-be taking that, th-thank you."
Why were there two separate Administrators on here alongside his own user account? Wait, he had a user account? And who was User , with the capital U? The implications were making his head spin. This was not the time for the universe to pull a quadruple sucker punch sorbet. Jo was going to fold this information up, put it away in his pocket, and box it away in his head for another day. Tomorrow, or another Tuesday. Tuesdays were really starting to become the new Mondays around here.
A frankly stupid number of steps later, he had staked his claim over the intended file, taken away SYSTEM's obnoxious control warnings, and all he had left to do was move it.
Requires admin permission—
"Yes, please, just do it already."
Transferring item. Estimated 60.3 RB remaining.
Not much, but it would add up. Slowly. Hopefully. How many other files did he have left to move to the other drive? He highlighted the folders. 32 items.
"Fuck. This."
Folder. Change owner. Apply to subdirectories, containers, blah blah blah. Remove SYSTEM permissions. ("And f-fuck you in particular."). Apply. OK. Close.
Applying permissions to 53 items. Estimated 15.8 zedronobytes remaining.
Ughhhh. Finally.
The little bar loaded bit (ha) by bit, and at ninety-nine percent a pop-up appeared.
Computer may need updates after moving these files. Move anyway?
"Y-E-S spells yes."
A click of the mouse and it was done. A small chunk of the work, but done nonetheless. Hopefully, maybe, just maybe, the computer would function and programs would stop crashing mid-use now. Now to the final stretch.
Storage manager. Temporary files (no longer needed those) . Leftover update files (didn't need those) . Thumbnails (of viewed pages? don't need those) . Saved online pages (another web history copy? don't need that—okay, save the one tardigrade picture it's cute) .
Delete to free up space?
OK.
He checked J drive's storage one more time. Still nearly full. Jo clicked refresh once, twice, a few more times for the hell of it. Fourteen-point-six zedronobytes free. Well, it was something. And it still had to update.
Start. Update and restart.
The screen went dark.
Oh.
Oh no.
Updating. Please do not shut down. Your computer may restart several times.
1%...2%...6%...
For a brief second, which turned into a brief minute and three seconds, he wondered what it would be like to be hiding in one of the vents, watching a man smack his head into a wall roughly every time the percentage ticked up. Not counting for delays, crashing, or the incessant screaming of a tired programmer. To his credit though, the screams hadn't started yet. He was better than the computer, and he still had a sense of dignity. Nevertheless, it would be better to monitor it during the update, and that meant another hour of this malarkey. Well, at least he'd be able to work on some frames for the time being.
Three hours.
Three hours of fighting with that piece of dreck (he'd have to thank Sori for teaching him that word) that called itself a computing machine, arguing with the nobody called SYSTEM, breaking and unbreaking directories and changing permissions, just trying to move some stupid folders from point A to point B in a move that should have taken 5 minutes of his day and then he could get back to work and see his kids,
and the update was only at 86%.
He could almost feel his hair falling out from the stupidity of it all.
The screen went black again and his heart jumped into his throat. No, no, no, he was not going to go through this again, he couldn't spend all night here, he was going to lose his marbles, or whatever was floating around between his ears.
The screen came on again. A light. The command terminal.
"HA-HAH!" Johan jumped to his feet and whooped, hooting and hollering and gallivanting around the room. "EAT MY LEFT FOOT YOU STUPID HUNK OF METAL! RAMIREZ TWO, MACHINES ZERO!"
Most assuredly this would go down in history—personal or perhaps studio—as one of man's greatest feats of strength and endurance against machines, those against the ink machine itself notwithstanding. And now would be the moment of truth, the final test. All he had to do was view his J drive to confirm, and
Five-point-four zedronobytes remaining. Please free up some space.
Johan leaned over the desk with a wide-eyed toothy grin, jaw clenched tight enough his teeth might actually have cracked from any more pressure.
"...What."
Allegedly, upon this revelation, the enraged scream he released, "produced a sonic wave that sent multiple flocks of birds swarming, Alfred Hitchcock style." (1).
Studio report, July XX, 19XX.
1. (Gracehopper, et. al.)