Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

Friday morning, I had a hair appointment. Before I left, as usual, I logged on and wrote a quick e-mail message to The Gryphon, telling him when I expected to be back. We usually chat online during the weekdays, in between getting work done.

When I returned, at about 12:30, I hit the button to turn on my computer. Meanwhile, I started doing my eight-minute abs tape.

When I looked up, eight minutes later, I discovered the computer had blue screened while starting up. This did not seem like a good sign.

I tried starting the computer up again. This time, instead of the blue screen, I got a black screen informing me there was something funky going on with the Boot.INI file. I didn't know what this was, but it sounded serious. So, The Gryphon being an IT professional, I called him at work.

He asked me if the room was warm. I said fairly warm. He suggested turning the computer off, cranking the air conditioning up and giving the computer 15 minutes before starting it up again. I'd been having computer problems for a couple weeks, and we'd talked about the possibility that there was a fan not functioning to maximum efficiency, which can create apparent memory problems.

Fifteen minutes came and went. I tried the computer again. It was still having Boot.INI problems. This time, I called him back and after a pause he said, "Let me get some stuff together. I'm going to tell them I have an emergency and leave work early to help you out." The Gryphon knew I had evening assignments to do if I was going to get paid that day.

He put me on speaker phone while he zipped around his office gathering software and things. "Don't panic," he assured me. "At this point it looks fixable." But he said he couldn't give me an guarantees, because in the world of computer repairs, that's a dangerous proposition.

I tried to keep my mind off it, doing my aerobics tapes while I waited for him to arrive and then sitting down with a tape of Law & Order and a late lunch.

When he arrived, I gave him a big hug. He asked me, "Are you all right?" with a trace of concern in his voice. I guess I'd sounded pretty upset on the phone.

"I'm fine now," I said.

He started working on the computer, while I caught up with tapes I'd recorded off the TV and hadn't watched yet. I also did my dishes and got some things done around the apartment. I tried not to think too hard about the sighing noises he made occasionally, figuring that if anything important came up, he would tell me.

Finally, he gave me the low-down. He was going to install a second hard drive and put all the system software and startup software on that drive. Then, if all went well, I could still access my data on the original hard drive.

"OK," I said. "Give it a whirl."

Fast forward a couple hours, and we were looking at a computer with two hard drives, one of which was definitely working and the other was still a little funky but functional. For one thing, my data hadn't all been saved in the original partitions but had been divided up into multiple folders on my own hard drive, labeled "found." I would have to go through them later to figure out what, exactly, had been found and what was missing.

The Gryphon installed all the software I needed to do my evening's work with plenty of time to spare. I was immensely grateful and infinitely impressed by his computer godliness.

After handling the initial emergency, we talked about the future. I started immediately to make backups of files from the old drive. I feel awfully foolish I hadn't done so consistently before. We're also talking about purchasing a backup program I can run once a week, to lessen the impact of future computer funkiness.

So far, the only files I might be missing are my digital photos from my digital camera. However, I've also been uploading those pictures to Ofoto.com, and I pretty much had backed up almost everything I ever took with the camera, except perhaps for blurry or throwaway pictures.

I did, however, manage to find my folder of webcam self-portraits, none of which had previously been backed up adequately.

The only recent Wild Violet files I lost were due to sloppiness and not thinking carefully. You see, I thought I was being smart by copying everything from the FTP server onto my hard drive, writing over the older folder, which had some new graphics that had not yet been uploaded to FTP. But I remembered what they looked like and was able to duplicate them without too much difficulty.

Going through an experience like this makes you do a lot of thinking. For one thing, I'm definitely going to establish a better backup system so future problems don't make me panic quite so much.

But the most important thing I learned was how right I've been about The Gryphon. The fact that he would not only spent thankless hours getting my computer operations again, but also that he rushed over, almost immediately, to come to my assistance. I'm just floored by this demonstration of dedication and selfless empathy. Makes me feel all giddy inside.

So now I'm going through the laborious but not altogether unpleasant process of installing drivers and such, and customizing my system: setting background pictures, desktop themes, preferences. So far, the new setup has been relatively bug-free.

Funny, disastrous as it seemed, this may indeed, be all for the best.

Copyright 2004 by Alyce Wilson

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