The Old Man and the PC: with apologies to Hemmingway

Poised for battle, barely breathing now, the icy cold CD-ROM held tightly in his clammy fist like some otiose discus, he approached his ineffable enemy from upwind. 

"It's either this or a call to customer service," he said. "Damn them," he thought. 

His desperation growing now like muskrat fur in a community center steam room, poking at the thing, stabbing like a crazed zoanthrope, swinging like a drunken golfer with broken opposable thumbs trying to sink a three-foot putt, swearing like a Christmas shopper at a cash-poor ATM.  

Once. Twice. And again. Nothing else mattered, nothing else existed, nothing. 

Spent now, sweating like an overheating hiker after a 20-mile march, his backpack full of melting Chunky Bars and a now-sticky-sweet bag of last week’s Four-Cheese Doritos, he fell heavily back to his chair.  

Gasping for breath like his niece’s goldfish in the snarling maw of an ululating alley cat, truculence hanging thickly in the room, throat full of moldering ruth, not quite sotto voce, he coarsely rasped, "Rats... where did I put that phone number?"