Over the weekend, I had a bit of a problem. My hard drive failed. But if you would have interacted with me, you probably would have thought my own heart had stopped instead. I was basically devasted and not sure what to do. This is coming from a former computer technician who has probably fixed and replaced more hard drives than a Geek Squad trauma team. Yet, I was kind of put into a position where I couldn’t do anything about it.
First off, I have a computer that has two hard drives. One of them is only used for starting up the computer, and the other one is my high-capacity storage one. Well, the one that starts up the computer is the one that appears to be failing. So, instead of discovering my hard drive was failing, I was just basically told that the computer couldn’t read my drive, which is short speak for “Sorry, Duane, but I honestly don’t know what’s wrong with your computer but it could be your hard drive, your RAM, or possibly payback for a bad relationship you were once in.” Then I discovered that I had no idea where my recovery or Windows 7 disks were. I tore apart my office looking for them, finding numerous copies of disks that haven’t been useful in decades, and rummaging through pretty much everything I had before discovering that the disk that worked with my computer was labeled a lot like a videocard CD they sent in the boxes, which is why I kept tossing it aside as I was looking for the “real” disk. That wasted Saturday. On Sunday, I found it, and got my computer back up and running. Since then, I’ve been scared of even shutting it down.
Last night, I got a warning from my computer basically stating: “Your hard drive is probably going to fail soon, and I also believe you’re out of Oreos.” While I was overjoyed at the complexity of my computer’s warning system, I wasn’t all that happy about the fact that my computer is about to fail. Or maybe it already did. I shut it down, and I won’t know what happened to it until I get home. If I have to buy a new hard drive, I can’t afford one until next week, and that also means I’ll probably end up with lots of stressful anxiety during that period as well. Oh joy.
But what I’ve discovered is how much I rely on this computer. When it went down, I looked around my house and discovered I have four other computers in the place. So, I could fire up one of the older ones, or my laptop, or my Macbook Pro, or my Ipad, or my Ipad 2, or my Kindle, or the computers my stuffed animals seem to have lying around the house. The point is: I’m not lacking for any computers right now.
But my MAIN computer went down, and that’s what bothers me. I do everything on this computer. And I mean everything. When I get home at night, it’s the first thing I turn on. When I need to check something, I do it on that computer. When I watch TV, quite often I watch it on THAT computer. Losing THAT computer really bothers me because I’m not sure I can handle going back to something that’s not 22nd technology (all the others were made at least a year ago).
So, tonight, I have to face the fact that I might have to do some serious work on getting my computer up and running. But it’s like I’m losing my best friend, which isn’t all that surprsing, considering I don’t really have any close friends aside from that computer and my stuffed animals.
But it usually takes an incident like that for you to realize how significant something might actually be. I do know that I can’t play Star Wars The Old Republic until my computer comes back up to speed, and that alone is devastating. Yes, as a colleague pointed out today, “real problems in a first world environment.” But that doesn’t take away the fact that I’m bothered by the whole situation. It just leaves it less relevant when put into larger perspective.
