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It seems the Universe is speaking to me. The transmission is generally one by one (weak and unintelligible), but the message is vaguely understandable when I adjust the squelch and dampen the static.
This past Thursday, my beloved laptop gave up the ghost. It had been slowing down and occasionally locking up in it’s old age, but it’s processor had always been healthy and spry, especially after a nice defragmentation and cache cleaning. As I had no advance warning of it’s death throes, I was not even permitted the closure of being present to say goodbye in it’s final moments of electronic vitality. It simply slipped quietly into the Dirt Nap Hotel.
R.I.P.
Upon discovering my machine pushing up daisies, I did what anyone would do – after reining in my growing panic, I tried to resuscitate it. I checked the power cord thinking it may have just come unplugged and drained the battery. Nope, not the problem. I held down the power button believing that could restart it. No response. I raced to Best Buy fervently hoping that the Geek Squad could determine whether a power cord transplant would revive my mechanized companion. They pronounced it D.O.A. In the span of five minutes while my back was turned, it had been reformatted by God and transformed into an expensive brick.
In a murky haze of shock and grief, I purchased a USB hard drive enclosure kit in the scant possibility that it was the laptop’s internal power supply that answered the last call and its hard drive could be salvaged. Even this final vestige of data was denied to me. My Gateway had passed into cow-spotted hardware heaven and been promoted to subterranean truffle inspector.
I celebrated its existence and subsequent passing into the Garden of Forever with a bottle of Bacardi Classic Mojito, but the timing of its solo flight began to bother me. It seems more than a little suspicious that I had just finished updating Quickbooks and uploaded a backup to Dropbox a mere 12 hours before it’s final departure. This was something that I had never done before and I would have had to reconstruct a tremendous amount of data and been forced to languish in Quickbooks Hell for perhaps another 6 months if this backup was lost. And then there’s the addition of the new smartphone to my electronic family to consider. Could this have been a coup? Is my Optimus V a murderer? I can only assume there’s an app for that. Perhaps my trusty laptop was only able to defend Castle Quickbooks long enough for King Backup to slip past enemy lines and elude assassination.
In any case, the sudden relocation of my laptop to Tomb Town has left me at a crossroads. I could start saving for a new laptop or perhaps a new, more powerful and less expensive desktop. Or I could simplify my aging home network of two unused geriatric laptops, a middle aged desktop and an adolescent smartphone by simply designating the desktop as the primary family machine and using the Optimus in place of my deceased Gateway.
The fact that I have been searching for ways to simplify my life and reduce the clutter and distractions is not lost on me. Neither is the fortuitous timing of individual circumstances which brought me to this decision. Perhaps I am, in fact, reading the Universe loud and clear as I hesitantly start down the latter path by sending the two unused geriatric laptops to the dance floor for their last horizontal tango. Or perhaps that’s just what my Smartphone Overlords want me to think.