“It’s a little stuffy in here,” Milieu noted. “Let me open up a new window.”
Photo by Maria Dhilla
Fourth-year Ava Milieu has recently faced intense public scrutiny over how many tabs she has open on her MacBook Pro laptop. Milieu claims that after calling IT five times, she eventually gave up and she went to find help at the Geisel Library IT support desk only for the boy helping her to post her search history online. “I’m so disappointed to see technician-non-paying client confidentiality being broken in such a flagrant way,” Milieu complained. “All I wanted was for someone to crack open my laptop and remove whatever was whirring so loud that I couldn’t hear my Spotify app over my Zoom recording, but this guy not only berated me for ‘having over 300 tabs open,’ but ignored me when I told him it’s okay because I spread those 300 tabs evenly between Firefox, Chrome, and Safari.”
“No, it’s true, Ava has this whole system she claims works,” explained Milieu’s friend Clementine Applebaum. “She uses Chrome for schoolwork, Firefox for streaming, and Safari for Wikipedia searches. I wouldn’t look into it too hard –– she uses the same logic that, like, superstitious old Greek or Romans used when they prayed to different gods for different things. You ask Artemis for help during childbirth, you use Firefox when watching Sonic fandubs on YouTube. Don’t ask me why I know this. But, you know, sometimes, I think she just likes to make things hard for herself, because then when her computer crashes and she loses important information, she can blame that for why her life is failing so hard.”
“I didn’t even get into the whole ‘three browsers’ fuckery,” said Parker Poindexter, a random student who helped Milieu out when she refused to believe there was no such thing as the Geisel Library IT support desk. “No, what I posted was just picture after picture of all this girl’s weird Google searches that she refused to exit out of. She just refused to get rid of the most inane, boring tabs that could be searched for whenever she needed them. Like, seriously –– who needs the dictionary definition of ‘garrulous’ on hand, or the site ranking all 45 ‘Classic-era’ Columbo episodes airing from 1968 to 1978, or the lyrics.com page for the song “One Week” by the Barenaked Ladies on hand? Who needs this?”
Poindexter took to social media to highlight Milieu’s “appalling” computer habits, only for many online to sympathize with Milieu’s plight. On Twitter, user @Lou_Dight defended Milieu in a thread, saying, “We all have tabs we’ve formed emotional attachments to. I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have my Wikipedia tab for “Lists of Soup” open. Sometimes, I need to know that my Google search for Esquire’s article “My Man, You Need Nécessaire Body Wash” still has the Lunar New Year Google Doodle where the search bar is. Human nature is to make connections, to find companionship with our surroundings. Don’t deny us this.”
Milieu could not be reached for further comment, as she was being treated for severe burns in the emergency room after placing her MacBook on her lap.
Former Editor-in-Chief. Like an ouroboros, her jokes consume themselves until no one knows whether they were ever funny. But they are.
