One day I mused about how nice it might be to take a vacation from my computer, for even a few days, to take a break from it and all that it affords me, the world at my fingertips, the ability to work on my photography and my writing with ease, to manage our website and put out our blogs. Even with everything it is capable of and all that it funds, I felt how attached I had become to it and momentarily wished it were otherwise. What else would I be doing if I didn’t have my computer? I wondered. What did I do before it became such a big part of my life?
The very next day, as I worked at my computer, the phone rang. I was able to say, “Hello,” and little else as a power outage hit and in an instant both the phone and my computer went dead. And so my wish was granted; my computer and I are on vacation!
It has not really been a fun vacation, not yet anyway. In the beginning my main focus was on diagnosis. Was it just the hard drive? Luckily, I keep a backup drive going continually and I also back up some very important things to the “cloud.” I’ve learned the hard way how necessary backing up is.
Soon I was reading Apple forums and support groups, gathering information, running Disk Utility, partitioning, renaming and restoring, and other things I never thought I’d be able to figure out. My techie guy is unavailable and so I have had to go it alone. I soon arrived at an impasse, so off to the Apple Store for expert help.
I returned from the “Genius” hopeful, my hard drive cleared for data retrieval, and set about restoring my files to my computer hard drive once again, but it soon became clear that something was seriously wrong. It froze. I tried a few other things. It froze. I tried shutting down and rebooting by pressing one key or another, and finally doing a “Soft Boot.” Things would look hopeful and then my computer would freeze again. Alas, more expert help was necessary.
Off to the local Apple experts where my taciturn little MacMini refused to boot up, refused to give anything and then suddenly sprang to life. I saw that my efforts to restore it had indeed been fruitful, but then it froze once again and refused to partake in any further probing. And so I have left it in good hands, its insides to be taken apart and evaluated. Will the diagnosis be fatal?
In the meantime I work on an “old” iPad, the first one that came out, no camera, no ability to upload audio. I find it cumbersome and it doesn’t handle wifi too well either for some reason, cutting out on me often. And so I am in the midst of my vacation from my computer, the vacation that I had so briefly mused about yet did not expect would really happen. But the universe hears everything.
It’s actually been nice to reexperience pre-digital living, to be shut off from so much. I don’t have an iPhone, though I do like having the luxury of my computer, access to everything that it affords, but I also dream of one day disconnecting fully, escaping to a different kind of existence. With the dire state of the evironment, it’s not a bad idea to muse about life post-digital. We’ve come so far, but are we prepared for real life should all of this be taken from us? What’s really important?
Right now, my treasured external backup hard drive that sits on my desk is most important. I guard it with my life. Should anything happen to that, I am done for. I don’t even dare to muse about that!
Be careful what you wish for, the Universe is listening!
Jan
