My cousin, Bien, works as a psychiatrist in her own mental-health clinic. Visiting her last Saturday, I noticed that her secretary has a new screensaver in her
Toshiba portable laptop -- an animated dancing teapot singing the children's nursery rhyme "I'm a Little Teapot". Bien, who sees humor in almost everything posted a note on her secretary's desk: "Your laptop is suffering from an identity disorder."
A screensaver pops up every time a user leaves his computer unused for a couple of minutes. Sometimes it's as simple as a blank screen, or a monochrome screen. But most modern users today prefer to accessorize their laptops with screensavers, therefore, having cute and silly stuff flashing through their screens like a dancing teapot. A screensaver is actually a file ending in .exe or .scr that the
operating system recognizes as a different program or application.
Screensavers are created to protect the monitors from phosphor burn. A phosphor is a chemical that coats the back side of the CRT screen. It displays fluorescence once it's excited with electron beams. But modern laptop users don't know this. They think screensavers are funny art stuff that bobs in and out of their screen annoying people around their desks. Therefore, having a dancing teapot on one's screen is not actually a bad idea.
