This weekend, after some very accomplished goofing off (three games of Sonic the Hedgehog
and its sequel and an ugly, fatty breakfast with my attractive, skinny girlfriend), I decided
to buckle down to some work on my Mac. So, I turned the stinker on.
Somewhere inside its guts, it clicked at me and loaded VEEEEERY slowly.
Amused, but not entirely perturbed, I turned it off using the "off" button you're not supposed to use because "Shutdown" tells all the magic fairies inside your computer when to go to sleep and you don't want them up all night because they'll steal your shoes. When I turned it back on, it clicked at me again, loud enough to know something was wrong. I could, in fact, feel the sound as it conducted from the computer to the desk to the floor, through shoes and socks to my feet. When your toes can tell your computer is fucked, it's time to call an expert. Which is exactly what I didn't do. I shut it down again. And restarted. Again and again.
Nothing doing. No matter how many times I tried to bend that machine to my will, it wouldn't load. I started problem-solving, recalling the brave, bold times when Hemmingway daringly mixed baked beans with ketchup and fish. I tried using the CD that came with the computer. "The Umax manufacturers wouldn't forsake me," I wailed, "not in this, my hour of need!" All I got was that crazy clicking. Just like Hemmingway, I might as well have blown my face off with a shotgun while "cleaning" it.
Now in place of the happy Mac symbol that welcomes you to a new computer dawn, a question-marked disk blinked accusingly at me. I couldn't take it. I turned the computer off.
I needed a new strategy. Luckily, chaos science teaches us that unpredictable things stem from seemingly stable events. You think Old Faithful erupts once a day at five past noon, then one day the fluid dynamics get thrown off-kilter by a single particle of carbon, the final remains of a hapless tourist's camera dropped in a moment of panic, interacting and ultimately crunking the whole process. Chaos dynamicists call it the "Butterfly Effect" because the flapping of a butterfly's wings in Nevada could shift the wind just enough over a long period of time to cause a hurricane in Honduras.
Non-linear systems often "fix" themselves, too, especially when nothing is all that wrong. It's why most of us don't jump in and out of mental hospitals. Okay. So, maybe a dose of chaos could bring the suddenly wildly nonlinear system back into adjustment.
I hit it. Hard.
When that didn't work, I took the cordless phone and hit it. Since it has no piece of spiral plastic attached to a wall outlet to slow it down, it was like tapping the top of my computer with a hammer. Still the awful clicking remained, coupled with the evil eye stare of the question-marked disk. What would it take to silence it? The inspectors shuffled their feet and drank tea, clearly mocking my anguish with their pretended ignorance of the clicking. I had reached my wits' end.
I pried up the floorboards to show them... well, actually, I took the computer apart. Kudos to those of you who recognized Poe's "The Telltale Heart." I took out the hard drive, remembering Mystery Science Theater 3000's spoof of "Manos: the Hands of Fate", when a man's car breaks down and he opens the hood to check: Crow cries out, "What's he looking for, a big 'On/Off' switch?" Yeah, maybe. When I tried to put the thing back together, I lost one of the screws deep in the computer's guts. Oh, boy. The tech guys are gonna crucify me for this.
Guilty or not, I had to call them now.
So I dug out the manual I'd thrown aside but prudently kept when I received the my Mac clone (manuals are for ussies) and dialed the toll-free 888 number. Umax had changed it to a new number that, they promised, would cost me no more than usual long distance fees. I called that. They were closed. What did I expect for 10:00 PM Sunday night? And what were they going to tell me? "Just go inside and look for the big on/off switch. Yeah, and be sure not to drop any of your hard drive's screws. If you do, pray. You've only got seconds to regret it."
Then I had another thought. My landlord had turned on the steam heaters in my apartment just in time for Chicago's latest Indian summer. My apartment was sweltering. Maybe having it on for six hours while I played Sonic the night before caused something to expand. It might contract back to its original shape if I left it alone.
This kind of obsession is like playing "peekaboo" with a mirror. You know image is there even when your eyes are closed, but you have to check - because if your image disappears you've gone totally crazy. And who wants to miss that?
A day passed.
No improvement. I called tech support, which is mostly an automated line reminding you to make sure you pulled the cardboard out of your disk drive before you jammed your floppy in. Quick fixits. When I finally got a human operator, he didn't even bother with suggestions, just, "We'll send someone out there. Thanks."
Well, that's that, I thought. Since 1991, I've been storing things on my Macintoshes. First, the SE with two 1.44 disk drives and no hard drive, then the Powerbook 170 with the active matrix screen and trackball mouse, onward to the Performa 637, which had a CD ROM and a 12" color monitor, into my current UMAX C500i PwerPC clone. Ah, Macintoshes, we've had some very good beer. And, for the first five or so years, I even performed regular backups on you. But then the technology started taking up more space and disks stayed the same, making backups a tenth circle of hell, and I put it off.
In the space of a night, I lost almost eight years' worth of data.
But people die. Technology changes, ecosystems evolve and the only thing we can really count on is April 15th. Oi, taxes. I typed a lot of ideas into that whore of a computer, and look how she repaid me. Now I'll never get the chance to write "The Werewolves of Mars" or finish my high school parody short story, "Jude and Prejudice". I'll never force the Confederation to pay tribute or explore the Star Wars scenario in Escape Velocity. All of my heartwarming e-mails and letters won't charm the hearts of generations of Larsens to come.
Screw it.
My computer is a whore. So I'm breaking us up. No more staying up late browsing improv sites, no more ice cream and Photoshop, or erasing our enemies' histories and sending dummy ICBMs to their houses. If she asks where I'm at, just say, "Oh, Matt? I think he went out with another computer. Probably a G3 or Pentium 2. He'll be back late, if at all." We're splitting up our collection of Zip disks, half and half, though I'm damned if I can think of what to do with them without the drive. I don't have a coffee table so coasters are out of the question.
My work will suffer. Hard to crank out posters when you're busy playing with Sonic or an attractive girlfriend. I'll survive. I recently stumbled across the Scud the Disposable Assassin website and realized I have a lot to learn on the drawing end of the equation. I can illicitly write my website at work. I can go swimming, make a sundae, drive a car, see a movie. And eat more fatty breakfasts with yummy corned beef hash and runny eggs hoping, perhaps, to build fatty coronary arterial deposits. Sooner or later, my heart will crash and I may join my data in heaven.
I'll see the bitch in hell first.