Hubris and the hard drive

By

I may have preached it for years, but I’m a poor parishioner for this sermon.

Back up your hard drive. Regularly.

I’ve owned my fair share of computers over the years, and have used different ones at work, too. I’ve nursed them through crashes, drive failures, bad disks, network hiccups and everything in between.

You would think I would’ve learned by now.

But no.

Take away my computer and it’s like losing a limb. Which is why I usually take great pains to make sure it runs properly. Good virus checker, good backups, good utilities.

I pride myself on being Mr. Fixit with the silicon set. But pride goeth before the crash.

I can tell when a drive is going bad. And they all threaten to at some point.

This time, it sputtered and rebounded, sputtered and rebounded.

Until it didn’t.

(I even had a whole weekend to back up the computer, knowing it was on the brink. I didn’t. Too much pride, or optimism, or stupidity.)

And so, the first late night, I looked up different strategies to revive it (using another computer). I tried everything, and it only seemed to make it worse.

Finally, it sputtered back to life, giving me one last chance to retrieve all my worldly data: calendar events, e-mail, tax records, dirty pics, half-written posts. All was saved.

Except the computer.

The second late night, I tried reinstalling the system software, when it would come on at all. But after much testing, it was out of my capable hands.

I wasn’t thrilled about buying a new computer, but less thrilled about limited access to my work and the Internet. “Hi, I’m Wade, and I’m a computer junkie.”

A hellish week-and-a-half later, I’m working from a new computer, slowly rebuilding to where I left off. My bits and bytes have moved mostly into their new home, and a backup schedule is planned, just as soon as I get this new machine up to speed.

Yeah, I was lucky. Yeah, I was also stupid.

Even as the technologies become faster and somewhat easier to use, my brain is still 1.0, constantly learning but never always processing correctly. My hubris is my main bug.

And it’s not likely to vanish anytime soon.

Share

About this entry