Sheila had less than an hour of juice when I first met her, though neither of us knew it at the time. From the way she swaggered up to her seat, she seemed to think she had all the juice in the world. But maybe that was just her personality: she was tall and heavy, with jet-black hair teased up in a puff-ball. She wore a black-and-white polka-dot silk jacket, thick gold chains around her neck, a big flashy ring, and tons of makeup. I was convinced she was the wife of a Mafioso, and I wondered why she was sitting next to me.

Actually, I was annoyed that she was sitting next to me. There's an etiquette required on long plane flights, and it's much easier sitting next to a man on a red-eye to Europe. Men don't talk to their neighbors; we don't give a damn if we're rude and unsociable to our seat-mates. Sitting next to a woman requires a bare minimum of polite conversation -- on takeoff, when dinner is served, when the movie begins, when the flight attendants wake you up for breakfast, and one last time when the plane bangs down on the runway. And it requires some concentration: innocuous chit-chat is appropriate, but no more -- lest it seem that you're trying to hit on an innocent woman, traveling alone. And it was even more complicated sitting next to a Mafia moll; for all I knew, she had three hit-men sitting behind us to protect her from intrusive passengers. It would have been far better to have an empty seat next to me; but the plane was full, and there were no options.

I learned her name when the flight attendant came by to ask what she wanted to drink after take-off; Sheila, it turned out, was in the import-export business, and was on her way to Sweden, by way of Brussels. "Why Sweden?" the flight attendant asked politely, only to learn that Sheila was planning to visit a reindeer slaughterhouse in a remote corner of western Sweden, for her clients in Korea were interested in importing vast quantities of dried reindeer blood to be used as an aphrodisiac. Her clients were also interested in bone ash produced by the ground-up bones of the unfortunate reindeer; Sheila was quite happy that this field visit was accomplishing two purposes. This was definitely nota woman I wanted to talk to.

I was doubly annoyed by all of this, because I wanted to get some work done on the flight. I'm left-handed, and I often find that when I put my note-pad on the pull-down tray table, my elbow digs into my seat-mate's ribs; I wasn't about to try that on Sheila. I had brought my laptop, in the hope of doing a few hours of writing on a quiet flight, while the cabin lights were out and most of the passengers were sleeping -- but I can't stand it when the person sitting next to me peers over to see what I'm typing. I once had a guy sitting behind me who tapped me on the shoulder every time he saw a typo in the material I was writing; I could just imagine Sheila leaning over to peer at my computer, squealing, "Oooh! What's that?"

The situation changed dramatically as soon as we took off from Kennedy and the flight attendants made the rounds with peanuts and drinks. Sheila groped into her cavernous alligator-leather bag, and pulled out a laptop computer of her own. She pulled down her tray table, flipped open the lid of the computer, screwed a Microsoft trackball on the side of the machine, and powered it up. A small green light glowed on the left side of the machine, just below the bottom of the screen. Color! was my first reaction. Awesome! It was an NEC 25SLC, a tad less sexy than the IBM Thinkpad, and a little less au courant than the new Toshiba or Compaq machines -- but with active-matrix color nonetheless, and a speedy little 25-mHz 386 inside. The logo for Microsoft Windows 3.1 was like a fine-grain Kodacolor print; it was all I could do to keep from whistling. But I was cool, very cool. I merely leaned over and asked, casually, "How do you like that trackball?"

"Mmph," she said, staring at the screen. "It's okay. I mean, it gets kind of awkward sometimes, 'cause you can't shut the cover of the machine without unscrewing the damn trackball. But that's better than trying to use a mouse on these damn tray tables. You know what's a mouse?"

"Well," I said, "it looks kind of clumsy, sticking off the side of the machine. The trackball on my computer is right in the middle, below the keyboard." Meanwhile, the green light continued to glow on her machine as the desktop flashed up on her screen, sporting icons that were generally unfamiliar to me.

"Yeah?" she asked, puzzled but still focusing on her own machine. "What kind of computer is that, what you got?"

"A Macintosh," I answered. "Powerbook 180. Of course, it doesn't have the color, but it looks a lot easier to use."

"Macintosh?" she frowned, as she started up a calendar program. "Never heard of it."

Indeed she hadn't. I whipped out my machine, and discovered that she had never seen anything with an Apple logo on it. Had never seen PowerPoint, or the Talking Moose, or Talking Barney, or the QuickTime video clip of George Bush swearing that he'll never again eat broccoli, or the kaleidoscope of sounds that comes with Kaboom!, or the ... well, you know what I mean -- that is, if you've seen a Macintosh, which Sheila hadn't. Of course, that's like waving a red flag in front of a bull: I spent the next 15 minutes running the machine through its paces; icons danced in the air, and it gradually became evident even to a novice like Sheila that there was no MS-DOS down under the windows. No eight-character file names; no "C:" prompt anywhere to be found.

She was annoyed; she could see that I was trying to outclass her. It never occurred to her, for example, that it was possible to have user-friendly power-management software to spin down the disk and dim the screen after a few seconds of idle time. Juice was something I worried about, and I had learned how to fly across the ocean with the juice I brought with me. Sheila didn't worry about juice; she had all she needed, and she was annoyed that anyone would try to use a machine with a gray-scale monitor to make her color machine look inferior. I could only imagine how many men she must have dazzled with her machine on flights like this; she obviously didn't need any dried reindeer blood with an NEC 25SLC.

To retaliate, she fired up a color version of solitaire on her machine, and began moving cards around onto different piles on the screen. God knows why she bothered; after all, everyone has seen solitaire. But I have to admit that the color was gorgeous. It shut me up, and I watched her play for a while. And that was when I first saw the green light fade out beneath her screen, and a yellow light beside it begin to blink softly.

I lost interest in Sheila's solitaire game after a few minutes, and grew bored with the game of my-computer-is-better-than-yours. I turned off the Mac, gave it a friendly pat, closed it up, put it away, and began watching the broadcast of yesterday's news on the airplane movie screen. But Sheila was hooked on her game, and continued to play for another 20 minutes. The movie screen had just switched to Tom Selleck in "Mr. Baseball" when she ran out of cards and decided to quit. She switched to WordPerfect, and began typing a memo; I could tell that she was unworthy of a Macintosh, for she typed the entire memo in capital letters. Capital letters , for goodness sake! It looked like a Courier font, too; no evidence of any class or elegance. The poor woman had probably never seen anything but Courier and Helvetica; I began to feel guilty that I hadn't shown her the Tekton font that I used for my personal letters, and the Mistral font that I used to fake my signature on my computer-generated faxes. I was even beginning to feel guilty that I hadn't shown her my on-board 9600-baud fax modem, but then I thought: lighten up -- she couldn't be THAT primitive, could she? Those PC-clones aren't THAT bad, are they?

After five minutes, I noticed that the yellow light on Sheila's machine had switched to red. But she paid no attention; she typed on grimly while Tom Selleck pounded home runs and complained that the Japanese didn't understand him. Suddenly, there was a pathetic "beep!" from Sheila's machine, and it shut down. Bam! No warning, no graceful degradation; all of Sheila's capital letters flew off into space, and were gone.

"Golly gee!" she said, glaring at me. Actually, she said some amazing words that could only have been relevant to customers of her dried reindeer blood, but I'll spare you the details. Sheila had run out of juice, and somehow it was all my fault. She didn't speak to me for the rest of the trip. Every so often, she picked her dead machine and shook it furiously, trying to see if she could shake loose some juice from the exhausted batteries.

I just smiled. It wasn't such a bad flight after all.