Friday, August 15, 2008

Loss

About a month ago, my Mac was giving me some problems. It would take about 20 minutes just to turn on, and when it did, it was slow and none of my files were there waiting for me on my desktop.

And I like it when my files are there waiting for me.

So I took my little guy (he was only 10 months old) to the Apple store, got him checked out, and heard the words from one of the 15-year-old Mac Geniuses that every computer owner will someday hate to hear.

Your hardrive is done.

Are my files alright? My 4 years of transferred undergraduate work? My 2 semesters of Brandcenter? My book? My years of collecting articles and tidbits and quotes and how-to-pdfs? Sir, are my two weeks' worth of continuously-playing, illegally-downloaded music alright?

Nope. All gone.

Fuck.

Did you back up anything to an external HD?

Fuck.

Sorry, brah.

I suppose that having my hardrive melt down was the best thing that could have happened to me. Because it put my life into perspective. In the 1 minute of my mind going blank, my hands balling into fists, and the waves of flipping-outage breaking over me, it took an equally short time to realize that it was just computer files. Nothing really so bad. Nothing that can't be replaced.

Nothing living or breathing.

It got me thinking how foolish we all are about things like this. That maybe we should look at these situations as opportunities. A way to start fresh and new and with nothing holding us back from whatever we did before, only optimistic interpretations of what we think our minds can feed our computers to hold for us in the future.

Perfect timing for a new schoolyear.

Because pretty much nothing before now will count after now.

Starting now.

dubs. out.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi. Just a quick note. It IS generally possible to recover data from a fried drive (depending on how it's been fried). It is not inexpensive, but can be done. The apple store people won't generally recommend it. Do some searching on google - drivesavers.com and others do this.

Good luck!

Mark Avnet (new brandcenter creative technology track prof)

jd said...

Hey Mark,

Yeah, they told me about the data recovery places you can ship your computer to, but that they were like $800. So I just decided to bite the bullet and have Apple put in a new HD.

It sucked. But whatever.

Good luck this year. Look forward to meeting you next week.

Jake