Luddites of the world, unite – you have nothing to lose but your General Protection Faults.
When both my laptop computer and my backup laptop died within two months of each other, I was forced to spend several weeks off-line.
What a revelation!
- Purging myself of the compulsion to know news "before it happens," instead I re-established my connection to the world beyond computers.
- I reached out to long-lost friends and visited one across town who still wanted to give me my holiday gift despite it being January. She was so glad to see me she had me stay for both lunch and dinner, each meal more delicious than the next.
- I listened to music again, especially my much beloved but neglected Krishna Das CDs.
- I went to bookstores, becoming reacquainted with arcane hands-on reading material known as novels, magazines, newspapers, and other periodicals.
- My telephone conversations with my long-distance relationship actually deepened, and our connection was not only preserved, but enriched despite the absence of IMs and e-mail.
- Indulging my not-so-secret cinema vice, I watched numerous Netflix movies on my portable DVD player luxuriously late into the night.
- Ordinarily too busy, I walked across town to my favorite discount department store for their year-end sale and bought myself, yes, some totally frivolous purchases.
That was the good part.
As for my laptops, I had to get them fixed, even just to buy a new one. My choices: the local $85-an-hour repair guy, or the out-of-state computer repair shop that charged $20/hour. What would you do? Well, since I don't drive, two days in a row I carried three laptops – two old, one new – on the train from Philly to a repair shop in Delaware, where my Computer Guy's located.
Can you spell cumbersome? Lemme tell you, there was nothing featherweight about those babies.
Bad enough both computers already had been crippled by spy-ware and viruses, despite protective software. The idea was get them detoxified in the shop so I could reactivate one, purge the other and sell it or give it away, buy a reasonably priced new one, and set it up with the rescued necessary programs, software, and files from both the old incapacitated laptops. Then, I needed to learn to use the new one's more advanced operating system, Windows XP Home Edition, which definitely required some tweaking, if only of my consciousness.
And before all that was possible, I had to listen to all the reasons why Computer Guy wants to leave America for a kinder, gentler country.
Which was even before said Computer Guy attempted to indoctrinate me with right-wing propaganda by showing me his favorite anti-communist video. "So Nineties. communism is way over," I demurred, adding, "Now the real radical element America faces is ... Bush-Wah and his Neocon junta who hijacked our country and its Constitution."
I confess, spending two full days down in Delaware, tortured by the owner and his assistant – who were both not only incensed I had AOL 9, but offended I had a Buddha as a desktop graphic which they kept deleting – frazzed out my last nerve, and I felt akin to being condemned to Dante's Ninth Circle of Heck.
Fortunately, I escaped, and now I'm baaaaaaaack online again! Folks, keep those cards and letters coming!