Computer Violation

Ever felt like you've been seduced and abandoned, even after you've loaned someone money? If the computer is an extension of the central nervous system, then I've been having a nervous breakdown for about a week. There were signs that things weren't right, but I didn't see them; finally my brain flat lined on Monday. Yes, my computer died. It clicked and stuttered before it seemed to say, "You know it's over."

I took it to Office Depot where they "backed up my data" and sold me a bunch of services I didn't need. Finally, when they wanted to put on a gigs more memory, rather than tell me a six year old computer with Windows XP isn't worth upgrading, I said, "Enough."

I felt like the Beaver: "Hey. Wally, is Eddie giving me the business?" So I took the computer to a better place, the Santee Recycling Center, and started all over again. My new computer has a burly one terabyte of memory on the hard drive, so I'm back in business.

Everything was going along smoothly until I took the thumb drive of my data that Office Depot had saved for me, and entered it into the new computer. There was no address book and none of my emails were on it. Nada! Stripped clean.  "#%$*!!!"

This time around, I got smart. I bought a new computer with Windows 7, and I purchased an off sight backup and recovery service. This beast has a terabyte of memory (whatever that is?) on my hard drive. Over this Independence Day weekend, I plan to recover as many email addresses as I can and contemplate how dependent we have all become on rampant technology.

Happy Fourth of July, everyone.