Don't Know What You Got 'Till It's Gone
Not the same, goddamnit...
And that was the last time I ever saw my hard drive. Alive, that is.
The next day, an Apple technician told me over the phone what I’d dreaded was true – my hard drive had hit an iceberg and sank, taking a year and a half’s worth of accumulated stuff with it like so many ill-fated extras in the movie Titanic.*
*Titanic is one of my girlfriend’s favorite movies, and she let me use her computer extensively throughout the crisis I’m writing about. This one’s for you, Jen.
Getting my computer fixed took about five days. I don’t know if any of you have ever had to spend an extended period of time without your computer, but if you haven’t, I don’t recommend it. Those five days felt like a boring, depressing month, because as I quickly realized, my computer is pretty much at the center of my life. I use my computer for all my homework in addition to all my non-homework. About the only thing I don’t use my computer for is eating, and even then, I eat about half of my meals sitting in front of my computer watching Arrested Development on Hulu. The second day without my computer, I ate a Qdoba burrito sitting at my empty desk, staring at the wall, completely out of habit. Not kidding.
It didn’t help that one of the overhead lights in my room burnt out at roughly the same time as my hard drive burnt out, because this made my room look shadowier and more depressing. My room is a boring place without my computer – I’ve got no TV and no printed pornography, so what else is there to do? Read? I wound up going to the library a few times to use their computers, but there are several hobos who also make regular use of the library computers. Not only did this make me feel dirtier for having used the same keyboards, but also I felt that we suddenly had something in common thanks to our shared desperation for Internet access. It’s never a nice feeling to know you’re doing the same thing as a hobo. That’s why I don’t yell racial slurs on street corners anymore.
Hoping to avoid catching AIDS from a library desktop, I checked out a school laptop from the technology department. As I recall from what little Harry Potter I’ve read, the school brooms at Hogwarts were pretty beat up and wouldn’t quite fly straight. The same could be said of the University of Oregon’s laptops. The six-year-old Dell I got from the library had the same general sliminess to it that most library computers do, and within ten minutes of getting it set up at home it crashed due to a thoroughly drained battery. For the 11 and a half hours it was in my apartment (I had to take this highly valuable piece of equipment back to the library at 9:00 the next morning to renew it) it felt vaguely like an impostor, as though your mother had gone on a business trip for five days and had hired a down on her luck prostitute to fill in while she’s gone. You wouldn’t feel comfortable with that woman. You wouldn’t form an attachment. And you’re damn sure you wouldn’t hug her. My loaner computer was basically a fake hooker mom, and I almost missed staring at the wall while I ate.
On Tuesday the tech repair center called to tell me my computer was fixed. I picked it up and was glad to see the little guy again, but his brush with death had clearly changed him. He was not the same on the inside – most likely because they’d had to replace his hard drive. The old hard drive, it seems, had incurred a mechanical failure of the sort that caused a piece of metal to scrape back and forth across the drive, literally scratching data right off of it. Apparently when they opened the back of the computer, ones and zeroes just came cascading out of there. Y’know, because so much data got scratched off. Not my best joke, but that was more or less what I thought about when they told me.
I’d been backing up my My Documents folder to an online backup server for several months. That, I had thought, was enough – it covered all of my schoolwork, all the blogs, and everything I’d written since 5th grade (although to be fair, the world would be a much better place without most of the video game fan fiction I cranked out in middle school). As far as I was concerned, these were the only important things on my computer.
About a year ago, I found an awesome pen and ink drawing on the Internet of a SWAT team battling a horde of zombies breaking into a building. I don’t know where I found it, but I saved it onto my computer in my “Awesome Pictures” folder, which I had not been backing up. That picture is gone, and there’s very little chance I’m ever getting it back. There’s a part of me missing now – a very specific, niche part of me, but a part of me nonetheless. Will I ever find another SWAT team zombie battle picture? Probably not. There’s not a wide market for that sort of thing. I also lost all of my music and the software I’d downloaded, along with my Watchmen desktop. I now know exactly how people feel after their house burns down with all their possessions inside. I mean, do you know how long it’s going to take me to download Camino again?
Some people say that God doesn’t shut a door without opening a window, and I’ll admit, the loss of all my MP3s has galvanized me into obtaining a much wider variety of new music (through entirely legal means) than I would have before, and the chance to load up my computer with all new data gives me a chance to be a little tidier with it this time around. However, I can’t help but wish that maybe God could have just left the fucking door open in the first place because it would’ve saved everyone a headache.
Truman Capps is rebuilding his lolcat collection from scratch, so to speak.