I haven’t avoided crossing the path of a black cat or going underneath a ladder since I was a child. But clearly I must have broken a small mirror this week, because the past 24 hours have been a doozy.
My Friday the 13th started early, on the afternoon of Thursday the 12th, when my aging laptop’s cranky noises and sluggish speeds became more than just an annoyance. After dragging itself through text changes on InDesign files all morning, it apparently decided life here at Fresh Brew Editorial Services was no longer worth living and died. But, like Civil War re-enactors in a bad movie, it kept on trying to get back up--only to collapse in a heap of HP Pavilion exhaustion. (HP used to like to tell me that “the PC is personal again.” HP, you were right: It sure as hell does feel pretty personal when when that PC dies in the middle of a major work crunch.)
At the advice of the Cyclist, who is also a computer expert, I tried to turn it off, holding down the power button as I counted to 20, then 30, over and over again, as it attempted to revive itself. Finally, I put myself--and it--out of its misery and removed the battery, to conserve whatever was left until I could get a second opinion from the Cyclist.
That night, he took it apart, looking for the problem. Perhaps the memory had gone bad, he told me. Maybe a circuit had shorted. But when I looked over at the pile of screws in the metal bowl, I knew my laptop was deader than a ferry-boat-accident-victim on a Very Special Episode of Grey’s Anatomy. Sections of the back had been removed. The hard drive sat on the bookshelf. And I pretty much wanted to throw up.
Luckily, however, I did marry a computer guy, so before I even had a chance to grieve--or throw a tantrum--the Cyclist set me up with his spare laptop. Talk about trust. From keys that have lost their lettering (who needs to look at the keyboard to know where to find “N,” “E,” or “C” anyway?) to a heavy load of software for work and fun, my computer endures probably more than its share of user wear and tear.
“It’s a pretty clean machine,” he told me. “Oh, I’ll change that,” I replied.
So now I am living in the cloud, relying on Evernote and Webmail. (Don’t let me down, Google Docs.)
PS: As if having one’s computer flame out permanently wasn’t enough, I also forgot until 10 p.m. Thursday night that I was scheduled to co-op in Scooter’s preschool class on Friday morning, on a day I had planned to bend the time-space continuum for work. Meanwhile, Scooter decided that the hours of 1:30 a.m. and 4:30 a.m. on yes, Friday, were the perfect time for a baby shriekfest. Then, after preschool, I went to drop her at the Friday nanny-share house, only to discover that I had the wrong location, thanks to my dead cell phone sitting in my overstuffed purse. And people say bad luck on Friday the 13th is just a silly superstition.....
The Cyclist with the Little Supervisor, when she was just a few days old.
Alison M. Rice