Sobriquet 40.23

The following post was originally published on 3/24/08.

Well, it's been an interesting day. I've been having quite a bit of computer trouble lately, which has limited my access to the internet and certain research avenues, but this morning the machine committed electronic suicide, quite literally offing itself and seemingly taking with it scads of documents and other precious data. Needless to say, I was not terribly pleased with the development but, having experienced similar "crises" in the past, I stoically took the thing in for an autopsy and had the computer coroner extract my files for me.

And now I stand, sixpence cap clutched to my breast, humming Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" as the staid cemetery hands of this idiotically extended metaphor lower the corpse into the ground...

Ah, but I did not weep. Nay. Rather I look to the future, knowing that the work started on one computer can easily be transferred to another like genes from parent to child.

Deliberately sappy prose aside, it does suck to lose one's computer. I mean, obviously, for someone writing a dissertation, the word processing and research capabilities of the average PC are of tremendous value. Still, I am of a generation for whom memories of computer-less living rooms and dens are quite common. I didn't even own a computer until I had graduated from college and worked for several months, so working without the buzz of a CPU is not wholly foreign to me.

Of course, I might have sung a different tune had I actually needed to use the computer today...

I did continue working, as I had planned, and will work a bit more before bed. I am still enjoying Waiting for the Barbarians, though I do occasionally find the tone a tiny bit didactic. As a philosophical novel, however, I suppose such a tone is both inevitable and ultimately necessary.

For tomorrow: Same old, same old.