Mom, this letter comes through my column because many others have suffered your ordeal and can benefit from the discussion.
You climbed behind the wheel of your PC 10 years ago and you’ve learned a lot. You now know that information scrolling off the screen is not gone forever. Now, you’re a good PC driver, running errands around town (e-mail and word processing) but wisely staying off the interstate (spreadsheets).
You’re not the first person to say, “I’m so frustrated with the computer, I’m about out of my mind.” There’s a simple explanation: Computers behave and misbehave like nothing else we encounter in life.
The “PC guy” on the TV commercials, a stiff but congenial guy in a light suit, is terribly mis-characterized. The real guy is a Steve Buscemi character, with a crooked grin lipping a Marlboro, a half-inch of ash dangling above white patent leather shoes. PC guy is a psychopath. Why do you think Dad avoids the PC? He senses menace, like a wild rabbit feels the presence of a coyote.
To make matters worse, these machines possess unimaginable power. Years back, I was awed by the Cray-1 Supercomputer, $10 million apiece, shaped like a circular couch and filling a room, and watercooled to prevent 80 million calculations per second from melting its steel guts down to China. Guess what? Your Dell notebook is 2,500 times faster. Yet we mortals bring such power into our homes.
PCs are unpredictable. We pull the fridge handle and the door opens. Press start and the dishwasher splashes. Sure, cars break but usually we get a symptom rooted in reality, like the thrum of a bum tire or steam hissing from the radiator. PCs break surreally, as if, while driving, the highway instantly vanishes and you’re sailing over a canyon like Thelma and Louise. PC failures can transport you to the twilight zone, like when the screen goes Day-Glo for no apparent reason and your Opera Guild minutes translate into Sanskrit. The real world equivalent would be the Ford dashboard turning to green Jell-O, the steering wheel to an oatmeal cookie.
PC failures destroy absolutely. Imagine an artist spending days on an oil painting when – pop! – all pigment releases from the canvas and settles in a greasy puddle on the floor. That’s a lost file. Imagine an entire gallery of fine art incinerating with the click of a mouse. That’s a disk crash.
Boeing 747s fly so reliably because all parts are masterfully engineered to work perfectly together. PCs are loose confederations of disparate software in endless battle. If software had physical properties, you could grab your PC and shake it and the software would rattle like ball bearings in a coffee can. When PCs fail, those balls collide like fissioning atoms.
Advice to set you free: do not love your PC; it will betray you. Love your data, and protect it like family. Your PC is a papier-mâché vessel, and when (not if) it breaks, your data will drift away like rose petals cast on the Ganges.
Not backing up your data is worse than driving without a seat belt. It’s akin to shimmying under your car because you smell gas, with a cigarette between your lips.
Backed up? Good. Now get back to work. Soon you’ll be parallel parking.
