Does this ever happen to you? It happens to me. Every. Single. Time. I’m working on my latest story or making a colorful graph depicting my predicted end date based on my ambitious daily word goals (also a work of fiction, by the way). In the corner of the screen, I see the pop up. “You have updates.” I’d like to say that I stop everything, though I am on the precipice of writing the most brilliant sentence ever conceived, and update my computer. That, too, would be fiction. I ignore it. I tell myself it will update when I shut it down. It’s probably updating something really minor anyway, like the sound of the notification chime. But it persists. The speech bubble nags me. It’s like it knows that I have been ignoring the emails about Windows 11 for the last year. So, I relent. I click the update. Mocking turns to stern admonition. ‘Your OS is too old to update! Why didn’t you read our emails? I’m paraphrasing here, of course.
Then the fan turns on. It whirs at random times and vacillates with the intensity of Poe’s Telltale Heart. I pretend it’s no big deal. I am in the zone. My word count looks like the readout on the gas pump when my husband fills up his truck. I take a break to fuel the impending bonfire of prose. When I return, I click my .doc and I get the spinning wheel of terror. Word opens in safe mode. I realize I am witnessing the exact moment my hard drive takes the first keystroke toward its inevitable crash of old age. Momentarily, my grief is delayed as I am distracted calculating the probability that I will be sitting here at the same moment it crashes (By the way, it’s 100% because if this thing is on, I am writing.) Then, I remember I do this twice every ten to twelve years. I suffer the self-inflicted wound of denial. I want my technology to last forever. Ask anyone who has ever worked with me. I hate getting a new computer. This one is perfect just as it is—well, except for the fact it might not boot up tomorrow. I don’t want to re-image. I don’t want to reload programs. Honestly, I am a complete baby about the whole thing. I pray daily no one will write code that causes me to update past my operating system’s capability. Yet, here I am, discussing the merits of integrated or independent graphics card, storage capacity, and processing cores and speeds with an utterly amazing Dell representative (No sarcasm here—they were truly amazing.) They are very patient as I raged against the dying of the byte.
I realize the universe is continuing to teach me the lesson of acceptance and it will continue to do so until I learn it. This is a self-inflicted wound of denial. The warning signs were there. I got the emails. I even read a few. I heard noises. Graphics were glitchy. I even opened Task Manager to convince myself that programs were actually running. Some were.
Because I do not accept that I will have to get a new computer every five years or so, I push it until I have no choice. I block the flow of my writing, worrying that the beast will crash in the middle of writing the most brilliant sentence ever conceived. All that beautiful prose will fade in the shadow of my inevitable, albeit clever, cursing. My new computer will arrive in a couple of days. I did my monthly back up this morning, so I am in no real danger of losing everything. My magical beast is still operable, for now. I’m making a calendar appointment to start computer shopping on June 3, 2027. Who knows if I will remember to do it? I hope, if I don’t, that I will remember to accept the repeat of this moment exactly as it is—annoying, inevitable, but not the end of the world.
This is 100% me! I’d rather go swim suit shopping then get a new computer. I laughed out loud when I read this. I can relate😄
Accurate!!!!