Owen approves of this situation.
I, Dianne Sylvan, have committed an egregious act of Macslaughter.
I’ve had my Macbook, Shakti, for 2 years. She was the first thing I bought with my advance for Queen of Shadows and Shadowflame. From the moment I first heard the familiar Mac BOONNNGGG! I was besotted with her. Since then she’s been not just a techno-toy but an integral part of my life. My Macbook is without a doubt my prized possession; I have quite a few belongings I’d be very upset to lose, but the only one that could potentially destroy me would be my Mac.
Say what you want about the hazards of depending on technology, but I bet there’s an equivalent gadget in your life too. My work, my volunteering, my communication, my day-job hunt – all of those depend heavily on my computer. I’ve done unemployment without one, and it was pure misery. I’ve survived without a computer, but I certainly did not enjoy it.
Can I give you one piece of advice? BACK UP YO’ FILES. SERIOUSLY.
I am not a careless computer user. I have been very diligent about keeping Shakti clean and safe and in a temperature controlled environment; not once have I dropped or banged her on anything. I run Time Machine (Apple’s backup system) once a month (okay, if I remember – but at least once every two months up to now). I spent what felt, at the time, like a ridiculous sum on Shakti; she was basically the bottom of the line 13″ white Macbook, but compared to my clunky old Dell desktop she was a fleet gazelle on a double espresso.
I drank the Mac Kool-Aid years ago thanks to my former boss, and while each product I’ve bought has been a serious monetary investment, it’s been so worth it. I used to have constant problems with Windows, all the stuff people always bitch about – spyware, viruses, crashes, memory issues, freezing, you name it. I think Shakti froze on me maybe four times in two years and a quick restart fixed it every time. There’s a reason people were so upset about Steve Jobs: HIS STUFF IS AWESOME. The Turtleneck of Absolute Power was bestowed upon one worthy of its weight. Apple has revolutionized how people communicate, how we listen to music, how we relate to technology; and beyond that, they’re just fun products. I had an easier two years with Shakti than the five years I had my Dell, and I’m quite sure that, had things been different, Shakti would have lasted at least as long.
However…shit happens.
It was just one of those things. Time sort of freezes, and it’s as if you’re moving in slow motion, yelling “NOOOOOOOOO…” and you can only watch, helpless, as a glass of Diet Coke tumbles over and drenches your Precious in sticky wet death.
I did what you’re supposed to do. I unplugged, shut down, and turned her over to drain. I let her be overnight, and then tried turning her on this morning.
Nothing.
Not even a blip.
I said a prayer: “Lord, I just want to hear the BOONNNNGG! noise. Just give me the noise. Please please please.”
Nothing.
I just sat there for a minute, frozen, my brain basically displaying the Spinning Beach Ball of Doom.
Yeah, you know the one. If you’re a Windows user it’s better known as the Blue Screen of Death. If you’re a rabbit in the novel Watership Down, you know it as “tharn.”
Unfortunately, at that precise moment I was supposed to be leaving the house to go do my Saturday desk shift at Thrive Fitness. I couldn’t sit there and fall apart; I had to put on my big girl panties and deal with it. My energy was crispy fried, which I’m sure the good folk at Thrive noticed, but as soon as class was over I hauled my ass to the Apple store.
Oddly enough the only thing that made me almost lose it was the sight of the giant Mac logo over the storefront. It’s going to be okay. The Geniuses will make it better.
The store was packed with people waiting to buy the new iPhone; there were Blue Shirts everywhere, probably twice as many as you’d normally see there on a Saturday, and a line of people out the door. There was even a Blue Shirt handing out water bottles to the people waiting. I asked him a bit tremulously if it was the line to get in the store, and he laughed and said no, just for the iPhone, I could walk right on in.
I must have looked like I’d wandered out of Bedlam. A young man was at my side in a flash: “How can I help you?” The way he said it was less professional courtesy and more “Doctor, this patient needs Xanax and a hug.”
I held out my Macbook. “I killed her.”
“What happened?”
“Diet Coke.”
The look on his face said it clearly: Oh, honey. But what he said was, “Have you tried powering it up?”
I nodded.
He looked grave. “Okay, let’s get you up here to the concierge and hook you up with a Genius Bar appointment. Just follow me…”
He and the two other Blue Shirts who helped me, despite the fact that the place was an absolute mob scene, steered me around gently, tapping their iThingies to get my info and put me into the system like I was the only person there. I fully expected to be told I’d have to come back during the week, but Blue Shirt said, “It’ll be about five minutes, if you don’t mind waiting.” Thirty seconds later M, a Blue Shirt with a lovely British accent, popped up with a “Hi there!” and took possession of my poor, sad, thousand dollar doorstop.
Apparently soda is about the worst thing you can possibly spill on a laptop, and I’d pretty thoroughly screwed the pooch. It was possible she’d be fine; sometimes, M said, they dried out for a few days and woke back up like nothing happened, but usually if you tried to turn them on before they were dry, the circuits fried, which was what I’d done. They could send her out to clean and repair, which would end up costing almost as much as I paid for her. In case you’re curious: spilling liquid voids your warranty, and even if you clean it yourself, they have ways of knowing that’s what happened if you bring it in later and try to claim it just “up and died.” I didn’t plan to do that – in truth, the only thing that mattered to me was getting my files back. I walked into the store expecting to have to drop serious money on a new laptop. I was just terrified that I had lost my entire writing life. Most of it I could get back in one form or another, cobbled together from emailed files and extra copies I have stashed around the internet, but even when you know that intellectually, it’s still kind of traumatizing to sit there helpless pushing the power button and getting nothing.
Having never destroyed a computer before, I wasn’t sure how data recovery would work; I was sure that the Geniuses would have to do some sort of sophisticated harvesting technique involving Q-tips and special solvents or some CSI crap like that. When M asked me if I used Time Machine, I said, “Yeah…I back it up onto an external hard drive.”
He blinked. “Oh! Well, then you’re fine.”
“I can just import Time Machine from one computer onto a different one?”
He gave me the cutest “bless your heart, you poor slack-jawed moron” grin. “That’s kind of what it’s for.”
Like I said before, I am not a techno-wizard.
What’s funny about this whole story is that if it had happened a couple of weeks ago, or a month from now, I would have been screwed. If I’d still been working on Shadow’s Fall, it could have been Very Bad Indeed, but it just so happened that I’ve written practically nothing since I finished the book. In fact, the last time I ran Time Machine was the week I finished writing it. But this one particular week, in this one set of circumstances, I had the money to replace Shakti and didn’t lose anything important. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect if I’d planned it.
A while back I decided that if Shakti ever did die on me I would want to upgrade to the 15″ Macbook Pro. I loved Shakti, but her screen was just a wee bit too small; I didn’t want an Air because, as my sole computer, I wanted it to have a DVD/CD-RW drive. This was all just dreaming, of course, because I pretty much never ever have a couple grand to spend on something that big.
Except today.
Granted, the expense shortens my job search window by quite a bit. My budget is tight, as you might expect, and this cut off my circulation. But it just so happened that, on this day, at this time, I had exactly what I needed to get exactly what I needed.
Thus, I’m writing this on my new MacBook Pro, who is as yet unnamed. I transferred everything from Shakti to the new machine seamlessly, and was able to replace the apps and media I’d downloaded since my last backup. The only thing I’ve lost is a file full of Firefox bookmarks for the Vegan Mofo blogs I was keeping up with, and I can have that redone in an hour. This whole thing could have been so, so much worse.
My life is like that, though. Things just…work out. Maybe not to the perfect scenario I had pictured, and usually not in the timeline I had planned, but things in my life just sort of work themselves out for the best, and things fall apart when I have the superglue and twine around to fix them. Emotionally I might be a total wreck, but practically speaking, I tend to be taken care of somehow. Somehow the rent gets paid, somehow there’s food in the fridge, somehow I just happen to have the right amount to replace my blown out tire.
And yet, for some reason, I waste my time worrying.
Silly Sylvan.
Want to know what complete, unabashed gratitude to the Holy sounds like?
“BOOOOONNNNNNG!”
