Daisy, Daisy…The Death of a Computer Relationship
Psychologists sometimes measure our mental well-being by recording the number of traumatic life events we’ve endured recently. At some point you’ve probably been given one of those quizzes where you check off which stressors are currently making your head explode: divorce, bankruptcy, even happy things like the birth of a child still cause major mental disruptions. To keep up with the way we live today, the experts really should add the death of a computer.
I’ve struggled for years with a 400 MHz HP desktop handed up to me from my grown son. He used it while getting his Masters Degree, so I guess it dates from about 1998. It was running Windows XP Professional, just to spite the IT guy on my last office job who told me that wasn’t possible.
Almost a year ago it began to make fearsome grinding noises. It sometimes refused to write to its CD drive; when I tried to make it, it would lie to me and claim the pristine disk was full. Months passed, and I couldn’t stretch the budget to buy a new one, or even contemplate a new, larger monthly credit card payment, so we kept going, pretending things were okay. Remembering a brief past relationship with Windows ME, I wasn’t about to buy anything with Vista, so staying in this less than perfect relationship had its good points.
Several months ago I got some part time work from home involving web page review. This brought me encounters with lots of things my computer couldn’t handle. Games caused it to freeze up. Some simply told me they wanted nothing to do with a 400 MHz system. I knew my co-workers were zipping around blowing through tasks with ease, while I had to act like a disgraced politician’s wife at a press conference, smiling bravely through the public humiliation.
When the end came, it was cruel. One day my computer simply acted like it didn’t know me. A curt message said my personal settings had been lost. The grinding sound grew ominous. A splash screen proffered a phony greeting and asked if I’d like to take a tour of Windows XP. A tour?? A tour of what was mine for 3 years??? No, thank you. Grudgingly, Internet Explorer opened, as if to a stranger, telling me it was on a ‘run once” basis, but wouldn’t be saving settings. Nice. I guess I could come in for 30 minutes to clean out my desk, huh, but with a security guard watching.
Finally, it let me put some important things on a few CDs, but it kept my address book and some of my pictures. We talked a little, just so there would be no public scenes, and used system restore, but it wasn’t the same.
I don’t mind admitting I was emotionally devastated. No matter what I tried to do, my mind obsessed about the computer situation. Panic nearly broke through the veneer of my social interactions. In the supermarket I wanted to scream to strangers, “My computer is dying and I don’t know what to do.” Family members began to avoid me because they couldn’t bear to hear me talk about it any longer.
As all this unfolded, my older son, who works at a university, told me about a nice older system available in the school’s surplus property sale. It’s a Dell Pentium 4, 3 GHz processor just like I’ve dreamed of, 512 RAM, nice big flat screen monitor. We’ve got lots of interests in common, mainly Windows XP. Life goes on.



