You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Our reliance on computers.
When my hard drive at work died, a little of my heart died with it.
When I packed up the night before, I logged off and said good night work computer.
The little screen pulsed and the hour-glass spun and the information I take for granted recessed into a dark rabbit hole I don’t ever consider.
Some of the information being saved is nonsense. but some of the data is crucial to my work life and my real life.
So I return the next day and the station engineer is seated at my desk.
We had been undergoing a change over of systems, so this by itself was not alarming.
But when I saw the big blue screen of death on my double monitors, I felt a surge of angst.
“Hi,” I say trying to remain optimistic.
“Your hard drive crashed,” She says with all the concern of a tenant who doesn’t pay rent.
“Huh?”
“Your hard drive is gone.”
If I was going to throw a blood clot and collapse like a carp on the deck, now would be the time.
“What does that mean?”
“Means your S*** is F***ed!” she says like a Bill Gates Assassin.
“My S*** is F*****?”
“Your S*** is F****!” she repeats.
She never looks at me as she pecks away at my keyboard trying to resuscitate this patient.
I stare at her and feel helpless. My S*** really did feel F****!
“What about all the video from the story I have been working on for 2 weeks?”
“Gone.”
“What about all the pictures I have been storing for my dad’s 80’th birthday?”
“Wiped clean.”
“What about …”
“Pfssst.”
She makes a sound like a snake passing gas.
“All gone?”
She stops what she is doing and stares into my eyes.
“Gone.”
She has the bed side manner of an undertaker putting makeup on a fire victim.
“How does that happen?” I ask feeling anger. “It was fine last night.”
“S*** is old,” she says. “it’s been dying for a year, you just didn’t know it.”
I feel my blood pressure surging. I can hear the blood racing to my skull, filling my ears, pushing into my angry place like a Jersey storm surge battering the pier.
“Excuse me,” I say walking away from the desk.
I kick open the rear door to the parking lot. I find myself by the big blue dumpster.
“AARRGGHH”
I scream at the sky.
“Damn it!”
2 salespeople walking in the side entrance stare at me incredulously.
One waves. The other seems perplexed. They don’t know whether to laugh or run for cover.
Work place shootings have erupted over less.
I kick the dumpster. It hurts my toe. I’m not sure this helps.
I bang the metal security door with my fist.
I think about the terabytes of data gone.
Poof.
Where does it go. Is it like they never existed, like criminal charges expunged by a court.
You did the crime, but the court forgives the act and destroys records of the incident.
You know you did it, but there is no record of it happening.
As I walk back into the newsroom, I try to remember what I was going to miss most.
The video for my dad? The investigative documents I had been working on?
How could they just be gone, ravaged like Somali pirates hijacking a freighter.
If this was a murder, there would be no fingerprints, no DNA, no ransom note or direction of flight.
The melt down of my computer is the new millennium equivalent of the Bermuda Triangle.
Somewhere there is a place where my data and a fighter pilot from WWII will be placed on a shelf to be categorized by aliens.
I think about how much we rely on our computers and smart phones and technology.
I walk back inside. It’s time for the 2pm meeting.
I feel like I have been knocked in the head with a sledge-hammer. I feel hollow as if I have had the wind kicked out of me.
Christ, it’s just a computer, I think to myself.
“Gotta get a grip,” I say sitting at the long table where editorial ideas are discussed.
That’s when the producer says “Hey, whatcha got?”
It’s an honest question. The tone of it is like finger nails on a black board.
I feel a shiver in my spine and a surge of crazy climb my spine like an express elevator zooming to the penthouse.
“”What do I got? I got nothing. My computer melted down and I’m freaking lost. I’m a Shepard without his flock. I’m a sleigh without my magic reindeer. I’m Batman without Robin. I have no contacts, No story ideas. No internet.”
Somewhere Edward R Murrow is laughing his ass off, saying “Punk ass kid. In my day all we needed was a pencil and some balls.”
I am so angry. I feel the blood boiling in my eyes like a microwave boiling tomato paste in a sealed jar.
I look through my rage at my co-workers.
They apparently didn’t expect me to be so upset.
My boss is curious.
“Does engineering know?” he says.
This too makes me crazy. Does engineering know? They probably did it while putting secret surveillance equipment on my computer to watch my every key stroke, I think to myself.
I feel woozy. If I stay a second longer, I don’t know what will happen. I have that feeling you get when you get off Mr. Hatters spinning tea-cup ride at the fair.
“I’ll be right back,” I say with a sense of calm.
I go back to my cubicle.
The engineer has installed something other than a blue screen of death.
“You retrieved it?” I say hopefully.
“No. I told you. Your S**t is gone.”
I stare at her typing away furiously.
“How long?”
She stares at me with a nasty look, then turns back to her job.
I walk away like a homeless man with no belongings, nowhere to go, nothing to call my own.
I will eventually go back to work. I will go out on a story. But I felt a pit in my stomach all day.
I have no email meaning I am out of touch. I have no contacts meaning I didn’t call everyone I can.
Without my hard drive, I feel exposed. I am the naked emperor parading through the newsroom showing my bare ass.
I will get through the day. I was E.F. Hutton and earned it.
Paper. Pen. Old fashioned Capitol J Journalism.
I didn’t look anything up on Google. I didn’t Tweet my story to promote it. I didn’t find my victim on facebook.
At the end of the day, another lead story, another exclusive.
I look up and wink at the ceiling.
A photographer passing by catches me. “You got a palsy,” he chides.
“Nah, just paying my respects to a great news men of yesteryear.”
“You’re weird,” the photographer mutters putting his head phones back on and editing his story.
Within days, old programs are replaced with new ones. There are minute differences in key strokes that make me crazy, but still allow me to work.
The video I was saving is gone, but the editing system is restored. I can begin again, and I will.
My screen saver, once a gigantic Life’s Crazy piece of artwork, that singularly identified my work space as mine, is now a big so what, who cares. It’s bright blue, right out of the Microsoft box.
I decide, if I care about it, I will back it up on an external drive, or load it onto the cloud. I learned a valuable lesson. Anything I care about is saved somewhere else. A thumb drive, an external hard drive, anyplace immune to the internet gypsies who swing down from the voidless beyond to rape and pillage.
Life’s Crazy™