Cyber Hell

                                    CYBER HELL

            Thanksgiving morning. The grandchildren are here watching the

Parade on TV enjoying refreshments as part of the ritual. My laptop is

propped up on the rug at the end of the couch. I go to open it late in the

afternoon and notice a few drops of (?) liquid on the keyboard which I blot with a tissue. I don’t think much of it but I do notice a damp spot on the rug. Oh, well, computer is working and I do whatever I do with it: check e-mail, play a little Bookworm.

Except next day it wasn’t working. No amount of button pressing or unplugging or incanting could raise the dead. It was cooked and so was I. Four years’ worth of Quicken posting and countless word documents and other stuff in there, most of it backed up, but not all, hiding behind the dark, dark screen.

         Computer crash stories are boring, like the recounting of an

airplane or automobile near-miss. Bad for you, blah for the listener --

and there is simply no way to make it interesting. Nevertheless, there you

are, awash in cortisol, freaking.

         I drove down to Small Dog Electronics here in Burlington,

to the Geek Desk, and handed over my 2006 Mac. The young man filled out

a form and said it was probably water damage and maybe/maybe not -- depending – data could be retrieved.  $49 for the initial look, the first of

what was to become a large outlay.  He called the next day and said it would

cost $600 to fix the old Mac but not worth it. Computer years are beyond dog years and my machine was older than I am. I am writing this on my 78^th birthday, so this can be set up as a ratio problem, thank you Khanacademy.com.

         To be honest, I had my eye on a MacBook Air, so this was

the time to get one out of “need” not whim. I told the Small Dogs to

go ahead and put my old data into a new MacBook Air. The data transfer would be thrown in for free and I was advised to get a back-up hard drive: $150 extra. The Mac Air is a sleek bit of silvery metal with no disc port. It is referred to as a “notebook” and runs Lion, a new operating system I do not love.  

         How surprising to discover that Lion will not read any of my Quicken 2007 data -- nor will it read old Word documents. I go to the Quicken website and begin what becomes hours of back and forth on-line chat with Quicken tech people somewhere Out There. Eventually, I upload the unreadable Quicken data and send it off for “Conversion.” It downloads but I cannot make a new Quicken program ($99) accept it. More back and forth and the third tech person understands the problem and prompts me to fix it.

         I clunk the converted data into a dialogue box and there, like the face

of Jesus on a piece of toast, is all my data, revealed in scrolling majesty. Three days of plugging away has paid off. It would have taken much longer

to reenter numbers from credit card statements and cancelled checks.

         Now on to Word:  I download the new Office 2011 for Mac ($150)

and set about installing it. Though maddening to be forced to get these

new programs, the Word, Power Point, and Excel, are great improvements

over the old versions. My old Word documents pop up all safe and sound. I am writing this as my first new Word excursion.

I got my first Macintosh in 1984, Johnny Appleseeded by Brown University (thank you, Sam) in a program whereby students could buy one new Mac a year through the university.

 This was before the Internet, so my first Macs were basically word processors. There were no laptops and the big, clunky computers whirred and ground away on the desk. Since then, I have spent thousands of hours watching the ball go around and seething and slaving over a hot computer How many altogether?  Like remembering family dogs or automobiles, I have to think back. Maybe 12? More?

         Despite all this computer experience, I still feel resistance when it

comes to calling Apple or figuring out how to make something go away or

to appear. Although Macs are basically intuitive, there does come a time

when you have to ask for help, awful though that may seem. A chipper Apple tech person helped me to (no $$, not yet: I get 90 days free support with the new computer, after that: $$) set up a faulty mac.com mailbox and while he was at it, straightened out a couple of other things.

         I asked Cousin Ellen, a Mac adept, why we go so haywire when it

comes to computer stuff. I wondered if our wiring – millions of years of

no bits and bytes – simply had not evolved to deal with this new phenomenon.  She said she thinks it is about control, that the machine outdoes us in ways most of us can’t approach. I wondered if it is different

for people who are born to it, people like the grandchildren on the couch.

I hope it is. I can’t say the last week has been fun. Overloaded

and exhausted, my nervous system brought me close to tears. I have a

certain sense of accomplishment but there is resentment, too, at being

captive of systems. I’ve thought about ink pens and carbon paper and the

clack of the typewriter. I really can’t say it was better before, or easier. I

know we can’t go back and that the only hope is to find some perspective and ways of suppressing the urge to chuck the whole thing out the window.