All of you are lucky there are miles of fiberoptics between us, because I need to strangle someone right about now. My company laptop — the same one that’s died and been “fixed” three times before — died again, in exactly the same way it has before. Except this time, it took a 1,500-word story with it, which meant I had to rush over to my uncle’s place to use his 1991-era Compaq to rewrite the damned thing.

(The computer used to be mine back when it was cutting-edge technology, so it was a brief little time warp. All my high school papers. All my college application essays. Letters to girlfriends. All still on the hard drive. I hadn’t typed “dir/w” at a command line in ages. The computer’s in horrible shape. The ctrl key has long been severed from its mother keyboard, which is encrusted in that yellowy dirt layer old computers get. The monitor on/off button is broken, so you have to stick a toothpick (!) into the monitor for it to work. The system boots into Geoworks Ensemble, a bizarre proto-Windows that crashed and burned soon after my computer teacher started evangelizing for it.)

Anyway, I rewrote about half of it at 6:30 a.m. this morning, then that computer too met its maker. I must have the IT equivalent of a black thumb today. So I waited until 8 a.m. for the Rayne library to open. The staff knows me well from my childhood, but now they know me well as the guy who rushes to the library computers in a panic everytime he’s in town because his company laptop has broken and he has to get something done quick. The story’s done and emailed off. I’m off to see if I can track down a laptop for the next few days. And if I can get the old clunker to work again, to look at my old high school essays and laugh at the 16-year-old me.

21 November 2001

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