Monday, August 17, 2009

I found grace watching my computer die

So it's the night before my internship finishes for the summer, and I'm getting ready to ease into another long summer evening. As usual, I pop open my mac and check emails and baseball scores when my computer informs me that, to finish "updating" my computer, I must restart the computer. Easy enough. I've done it countless times through my three year journey with this particular computer. So I dutifully click the "Restart" button, and wait for my machine to rev to life again. And that is where the fun began...

As I'm waiting for the computer to restart, I go over and take a swig of water, trying to stay somewhat hydrated before my run later that evening, but when I come back to the computer, I see that it's stuck on the white apple start-up screen. 10 minutes later I start to get worried. This has never happened with my computer, hopefully it's just a little glitch, right? I reboot the computer several times, all with no luck. That darn white apple start-up page is the farthest it will go. After 30 minutes of this, I start to realize something very profound, and it causes me to slightly panic, kind of like that slow, horrible feeling you get when you realize you've locked your car keys in the car...

I'm an idiot. I haven't backed up my computer in 4 months. Not a single file, since the end of school, is safely backed-up on a thumb drive or external hard drive. They are, all of them, trapped inside my computer, hostages from their creator. (it's okay, you can laugh) It's at this point that I am kicking my self, well, at least i'm doing so in my head. How could I be so stupid? Tomorrow I'm presenting all of my files to my supervisor, and here I am with zero access to them. How great will that sound..."uh, so I lost all my files last night, sorry"...

In the midst of my internal panic and fascination with the new depths of stupidity that I had reached, I started to finally get a grip. Come on mark, you know a thing or two about computers, put that limited knowledge to some sort of use here. So i try the few tricks I know, but they are all hopelessly falling short, reminding me that I am utterly and completely out of control.

I need some sort of miracle here, or at least i need my computer to start acting properly. I've tried everything I know to do, but still I'm completely helpless, in need of some saving grace...

Fastforward 2 hours, in which time i've succumb to the realization that I won't get these files back. I've started the tricky process of rationalizing this bizarre event in my head, coming up with clever excuses to feed my supervisor tomorrow. But there's that sinking feeling down deep, realizing that nothing I can say will hide my idiocy. "You mean in 3 months you didn't back up one single file?...wow mark, college degree taught you a lot, eh?"

I walk back to my computer, to the lost cause that it is, and give it a go one last time. It hems and haws, but then, strangely, and for reasons i still can't really quite put together, it comes back. Oh my goodness! I race to my room to get my external hard drive, sprinting up the stairs like i'm back in high school finishing a leg of the 4x100 meter relay. I get to my computer, plug the hard drive in, and set to work backing up all those crazy files. 30 minutes later, i'm done, and absolutely astonished at the events of the evening.

With my backup complete, I finally take that run i'd been gearing up for earlier in the evening, starting out way too fast and screwing up any notion of "pace" known to man. But I didn't care. It was great. I felt like a man with a monkey off his back. After cooling down, showering, and grabbing some water, I come back to the computer, turn it on, but get nothing. That's right, nothing...

Miraculously, in the long, slow, process of the death of my computer, I somehow got 30 minutes with it before it croaked. Like one of those old stories from the middle ages where the dying monk holds on to life until receiving his last rites, my computer somehow managed to give me 30 minutes before it finally died...

Needless to say, I gained a new perspective on mercy that evening. Undeserved, unmerited, mercy. I found grace watching my computer die.

No comments: