PrintPoem – I Traded Ethel for Tiffany (By Donal Mahoney)
I Traded Ethel for Tiffany
I know very little about computers
but I use one for basic needs.
Poems, stories, not much more.
Like some nice women I’ve known,
I’ve discovered computers
have a mind of their own.
They do what they want
and expect me to understand.
The problem is I never do.
I babble in amazement.
And like the nice women I’ve known,
computers fail to tell me
what I’ve done to upset them.
They simply crash and
never revive unless I spend
big bucks to repair them.
Many times I’ve spent money
on Ethel, my old computer,
until Biff, the repairman, told me
she’s too old and I should
trade her in for a new model
with features that match
a man with my needs.
I took Biff’s advice and traded
Ethel for Tiffany and added
hundreds more in cash.
So far, so good.
She has a dependable server
and seems to understand me.
Biff told me if Tiffany
ever gives me trouble
I can trade her in for Tammy.
Tammy will cost me more
but she’s a delight, Biff says,
to turn on in the morning
and has a cursor to die for.
Author Bio:
Donal Mahoney lives in St. Louis, Missouri. He has had fiction and poetry published in various publications in the U.S. and elsewhere. Among them are The Galway Review (Ireland), The Recusant (England), The Missing Slate (Pakistan), Guwahatian Magazine (india), Bluepepper (Australia), The Osprey Journal (Wales), Public Republic (Bulgaria), and The Istanbul Literary Review (Turkey). Some of his earliest work can be found at http://booksonblog12.blogspot.com and some of his newer work at https://www.antarcticajournal.com/donal-mahoney-recent-works
