Crash and Burn

Sure.

One little button. It all sounds so simple.

Just push the button and access the world at my fingertips.

Until yesterday.

Oh, to be sure, there were warning signs.

But who really pays attention to the warning signs when eventually you can micromanage a solution and be up and running in no time at all.

Sadly, reality sets in and the gentle whirr and hum of a familiar constant is no more. The jaws of life cannot pry the victim out and the thrum of the heartbeat stills.

The computer went out in a blaze of glory taking with it all of my work and research as violently as possible.

The solution seems obvious to the novice. Call the geeks in taped glasses to come and resurrect the dying and dead bits and bytes restoring them to a new life in cyberspace yet to come.

However...it was not to be.

Fortunately, my husband, who is himself somewhat of a geek (don't panic - this isn't fresh information to him!), has taken the Herculean task of removing the good from the bad and installing it on my birthday present...uh...new computer.

It isn't like we should mourn the tragic passage of a computer whose time came too soon. The other machine was over 4 years old and had begun to live a life of it's own, irrespective of the desires of the operators.

I often suspected it of espionage among the other household appliances and electronics.

But now, with it's power plug life support pulled and the glowing red eye dimmed into a temporary death, the new computer has already taken the place one held dear to the old machinery. Warm and useful, it is enabling me to be back online and back to my writing which, other than this blog, no one may ever actually read.

I don't feel any particular sense of sorrow and sadness about this, because like the current coach of the Crimson Tide says, "It is what it is."

The only unsettling part about this is a niggling sense of betrayal in the back of my mind. Almost as if I have betrayed the trust of a friend. After all, the other computer did perform its functions in admirable fashion, until the digital Alzheimer's set in.

Perhaps in the press for the now, my patience did wear thin upon it's aging circuits from time to time, but I never abused it. Instead, I would mutter under my breath and reboot praying for cyber sanity to be restored to the day.

Being able to access my email and check what is going on in the world today is almost a birthright now. Our society has become so dependent upon the technology of our day that we can't just call and say the computer is down and chat on the phone.

Oh no! We must take it upon ourselves to search out a friend, an acquaintance or a complete and total stranger in an Internet cafe and plead for a moment of their time to share the personal suffering over the loss of our Internet privileges at home.

Small wonder why kids today have no clue what a Victrola was or how to use a 10-key adding machine. They have been saturated from birth in the nanoprocessors and gigabytes of daily techno-speak as surely as they were swaddled in a fluffy baby blanket. They lack the on the ground information of how we got to this point, gleefully enmeshed in the 'now' with no interest in how we got here. It may be geek to us but it is most assuredly Greek to them.

Of course, they can't SPELL either. Thanks to the world of text messages and rapid fire responses, they have no time to "C U l8r" because another important text message just arrived with its youthful gibberish in a language that few adults truly comprehend. Or want to.

One wonders what our language will be like in the post modern world. In years to come, will babies be born with computer interfaces like the Borg on Star Trek? Will we all pause for the face blind, eyes dulled daily uplink and download of all that we need to know as determined by a collective or perhaps just one person?

Who's vision of progress do we kneel before - Mac or Windows? or is there yet another shadowy contender yet to be born who will do for us what neither OS has done before? It truly is a voyage to a place no one has ever been.

This is all too much on a semi empty stomach. I am becoming queasy just thinking about it.

Regardless of how life plays out, a majority of the industrialized world is hooked up, tuned in and running along full tilt toward a future that is as uncertain as crossing the prairie in a covered wagon. Minus the wagon, the void in our day is crossed with passwords and icons and clicks of a mouse that direct our path toward the event horizon in technological wonder.

I wonder if I can keep up. I feel like a straggler in the wagon train heading west - 'Have we lost her AGAIN!?! She is just too dense to bring along...let's hope for wolves!"

The new computer keeps asking me (as if I am stupid) if I really meant to do that... I am not sure how to respond sometimes since the only little tabs I have to choose from are 'YES', 'NO' and 'CANCEL'.

While I am sure my intent is good, nonetheless, having a digital overseer is a lot of pressure for a person who uses electronics fearfully because the truth is, they know they are in charge. I want to be savvy. I took a couple of classes promising to make me 'all that' in the computer world. Sadly, they only served as grade point ballast to keep me humble about the glorious A's I was racking up in science classes.

Oh well. The computer beeped. It appears ready to read and regurgitate the next disc of needed information. My job is just to keep the discs coming. I am not deluded. But the computer also knows that if I detect even a whisper of sass, I can cut it off from the current in a trice.

It is a cold war, but a war I can stand. I have vowed not to introduce the computer to any other appliances or electronics, other than those on the desktop. Two playmates is enough for any computer to crash.