CNTL-ALT-DEL

Control-Alt-Delete

Verse 1
Back when screens were big and beige,
And floppy disks were king,
You’d type all day and save your work,
And pray you saved the thing.
Then suddenly the screen went blue,
Your heartbeat skipped a beat,
There was one old prayer we all knew well:
Control-Alt-Delete.

Chorus
Control-Alt-Delete,
When the damn thing won’t behave,
Control-Alt-Delete,
When there’s nothing left to save.
Forty years of progress,
And we’re smarter—so they say,
But when technology loses its mind,
Turn it off anyway.

Verse 2
We went from DOS to Windows,
From dial-up to the cloud,
Our phones got smart, our cars got smart,
Our refrigerators got proud.
Now everything can talk to you,
From Siri to your seat—
But sooner or later they all need
Control-Alt-Delete.

Chorus
Control-Alt-Delete,
When the damn thing won’t behave,
Control-Alt-Delete,
The universal way.
Bill Gates gave us Windows,
Silicon Valley gave us AI,
But sometimes the smartest thing you can do
Is shut it down and try.

Verse 3
I asked AI a simple thing:
“There’s a woman feeling sick.”
It pondered all the dangers
And tied itself up quick.
I changed a word, I tried again,
It still admitted defeat—
So I closed the app and started fresh:
Control-Alt-Delete.

Bridge
Now Hal can write a sonnet,
Make a picture, write some code,
Explain the Roman Empire,
Or tell you where to go.
But every now and then poor Hal
Gets tangled in his feet—
And Chris remembers wisdom
From nineteen-eighty-three…

BREAKDOWN — spoken:
Did you save it?
“No.”
Did you reboot it?
“No.”
“Well, there’s your problem.”

Final Chorus
Control-Alt-Delete!
Still the champion of the day,
Control-Alt-Delete!
Some things never go away.
We put a man upon the moon,
Put the whole damn world online,
Built artificial intelligence—
And the fix is still the same damn line:

Turn it off.
Turn it on.
See if it’s okay.

And if that doesn’t work…

Control. Alt. Delete.