It's a sad thing, an ailing computer.
Mine's been going downhill for months. Signals that the end was coming had been appearing almost daily.
Failure of the battery to charge. Constant freezing. A cursor that had a mind of its own.
I felt sorry for the thing. I also wanted to throw it out the window.
"Man!" I moaned. "I have been trying to get on the ferries' website for half an hour to make a reservation and the site keeps crashing on me."
"That's not the website," observed the husband. "That's your computer."
"I KNOW it's my computer," I said. "I can't stand my computer."
Such thinking, I knew, was not particularly sensitive, given that the computer was far from healthy and clearly on the decline.
Still, it was impossible not to get, well, a little riled up. And riled up I tended to get, especially when I'd composed a 400-word note to my sisters on Facebook, only to have the computer decide it was time to power off.
"Stupid computer!" I'd yell at the thing.
"You shouldn't yell at it," the husband would say. "It's really old."
Yes, yes, I knew it was old - probably four or five years beyond its best-before date. I also knew there was no point in yelling at the thing, given that it had a keyboard, a screen and a battery, but nothing resembling ears.
The husband urged me to buy a new computer, but I resisted.
A mistake, it turns out. I had created a document and was assembling the figures for our income tax. The document was four pages long. I was punching in the last of the numbers when the computer decided its time was up.
The screen flickered for a second or two, then faded to black.
"No!" I hollered. "I hadn't saved that!" "Oops," said the husband. I glared at him. Given the chance to revisit the moment, he would likely have opted to say something else.
I tried valiantly to power up the computer. Nothing. Turns out it would not have mattered whether I'd saved the document anyway, given that the computer was as dead as, well, a dead computer.
I stared at the thing and wondered how it was that the computer's demise had left me adrift, given that there was a day - not that many years ago - when I didn't even own one. In those days, I vaguely recalled, I got by with other tools. A typewriter. A phone book. A calculator. Some paper and a pen.
Some folks would say those days were sweet and the best of simpler times.
I get that they're hooked on nostalgia. But I happen to think they're nuts.
