Resurrection
My laptop died last September.
No, it wasn't sudden. It had been sick for a long time. It was very old. It was two years old when I bought it, and I bought it the summer before going to University.
The thing served me well, doing everything I asked of it. Which wasn't much. I used it faithfully through to third year when I moved in with Bronwyn.
Her desktop PC was newer, had more memory and was faster. I switched over. My laptop sat in its case, unused and forgotten until last spring when it came time to move out. I fired it up and it ran gamely for me, eating file after file as I fed everything I had on Bronwyn's computer onto the ancient laptop. Everything seemed fine.
I wrote on it all summer. And it grew sicker as the summer wore on. First the internal mouse went. Then it came back. And stopped working again. And came back. Randomly.
Then the keyboard stopped working. And started. And stopped. And... You get the picture.
Stupidly, I kept putting off the data dump I knew I had to do. Until it was too late.
In September my laptop died. One day it just wouldn't wake up.
And I was pissed.
On it was four years worth of University work. Every essay was on it, including my undergraduate thesis.
On it was four years worth of fiction. Ten short stories with multiple drafts of each. One aborted novel attempt. Another novel that I had started over the summer and had every intention of continuing.
And it was all on a dead laptop.
Furious, I buried it in a corner of my room and got another computer to work on. I was so busy with the newspaper that putting off the data retrieval was very simple to do.
Until today when I started talking with Shokes about writing and the stories I'd written a few years back.
I exhumed the old laptop and watched disbelieving as it woke up at a simple flick of the switch. I calmly copied the most recent drafts of each story, the ongoing novel, and my thesis onto disk. I fired up the new computer and scanned the files for viruses and copied them to the hard-drive.
I'm an extremely happy person right now.
No, it wasn't sudden. It had been sick for a long time. It was very old. It was two years old when I bought it, and I bought it the summer before going to University.
The thing served me well, doing everything I asked of it. Which wasn't much. I used it faithfully through to third year when I moved in with Bronwyn.
Her desktop PC was newer, had more memory and was faster. I switched over. My laptop sat in its case, unused and forgotten until last spring when it came time to move out. I fired it up and it ran gamely for me, eating file after file as I fed everything I had on Bronwyn's computer onto the ancient laptop. Everything seemed fine.
I wrote on it all summer. And it grew sicker as the summer wore on. First the internal mouse went. Then it came back. And stopped working again. And came back. Randomly.
Then the keyboard stopped working. And started. And stopped. And... You get the picture.
Stupidly, I kept putting off the data dump I knew I had to do. Until it was too late.
In September my laptop died. One day it just wouldn't wake up.
And I was pissed.
On it was four years worth of University work. Every essay was on it, including my undergraduate thesis.
On it was four years worth of fiction. Ten short stories with multiple drafts of each. One aborted novel attempt. Another novel that I had started over the summer and had every intention of continuing.
And it was all on a dead laptop.
Furious, I buried it in a corner of my room and got another computer to work on. I was so busy with the newspaper that putting off the data retrieval was very simple to do.
Until today when I started talking with Shokes about writing and the stories I'd written a few years back.
I exhumed the old laptop and watched disbelieving as it woke up at a simple flick of the switch. I calmly copied the most recent drafts of each story, the ongoing novel, and my thesis onto disk. I fired up the new computer and scanned the files for viruses and copied them to the hard-drive.
I'm an extremely happy person right now.
