It has been awhile since my last blog entry. I’ve not been deliberately avoiding ‘thoughts from the spiral’; rather, I had an unexpected hard drive failure (as though anyone ever really expects the computer to just die one day).
The good news is that I had recently performed a full-system back-up, and my laptop was still covered under Apple’s Extended Care warranty. But it still meant shipping my computer off to Apple for repairs and being laptop-free for nearly a week.
Several years ago, I had the video board die on a laptop, and it couldn’t have happened at a worse time. I was three days away from turning over the final files of a three-year-long public health project, and was due to leave on a two-week working road trip just two days after that. I had to have a fully functioning computer. Not only that, but this also happened on the day after Thanksgiving, so running back and forth to the computer store — which was located a good twenty miles away — and finding parking was no picnic with all of Consumer America out in full force.
Although the repair would be a fairly simple one, it could not be done in-house; the laptop would have to be sent away, though it could be repaired within a week. That was too long, of course, given my impending deadlines. Once I added up the expected costs of repair, data retrieval from the hard drive and transfer to a rental machine, plus the cost of the rental machine for a two-week period (for my road trip), I was within $200 of the price of a new machine.
Even though there was no money budgeted for it, I bit the bullet and bought a new laptop. The ailing computer got sent away for its simple fix and returned promptly in pristine condition, to be sold to a very happy and grateful neighbor.
With this month’s hard drive failure, however, I wasn’t under any such deadlines or threat of travel. I’d done all my back-ups, and the repair wouldn’t cost me anything. I figured it might be good for me to get away from the computer for a week. So I boxed up my iBook on a Friday afternoon and turned it over to DHL to ship off to Apple.
Then I panicked when I remembered that I still had bills to pay, and everything had been set up online with no paper trail. Easy fix: a friend let me come use her machine for forty-five minutes, and then I took her to get her vacuum cleaner repaired.
When I came home that afternoon, I was a bit lost. No e-mail to check? No web research to pursue? I wasn’t quite sure what to do with myself. I tried watching television, which was perfectly mindless, and I soon lost interest. Then I remembered the long list of books I’d wanted to read…. The rest of the weekend passed blissfully by as so many turned pages.
Bright and early Tuesday morning, my laptop came back to me. Already? I was almost disappointed not to have more time ‘unplugged.’ I began the process of reinstalling my most-used software applications, transferring my data from my back-up drive onto the iBook’s new hard drive…
I love my computer. Anyone who knows me can tell you that. But it was just too much too soon. I went back to reading.
My computer came back to me nearly two weeks ago now, and I still haven’t returned to the same plugged-in routine I’d been living before. Nowadays, I take breaks to go sit in the grass. For real. This reminds me of September 2003, when I became ‘unintentionally Amish.’
We’d had a hurricane blow through town, and pretty much the entire city (Richmond, Virginia) lost power for a week or more. I was still able to conduct my home office business — albeit by packing up my computer and other materials every morning and heading over to my father’s house, where a DSL connection and electricity awaited me (he’d gotten his power back within 24 hours). But then I’d head back home again, where I listened to the crickets chirping outside, watched the stars come out in the evening sky, and read “The Lord of the Rings” by candlelight.
When the power was restored to my neighborhood about a week later, most of my neighbors really cranked up all of their lights and appliances. It was pretty disturbing, after the peace and quiet of living without electricity. In the weeks that followed, I slowly re-acclimated to the electric lifestyle, as I found that even the dimmest table lamp was too bright, the radio too loud, the alarm clock too harsh.
It had been a good experience, learning just how easy it was to live without something we’re sure we are absolutely dependent upon. I got to repeat this exercise this month when my computer got shipped away. I’m glad it’s back, but I see it now for the tool it is, rather than the constant companion that had previously been glued to my fingertips.
It can be surprisingly refreshing and restoring to disconnect, even for a little while.