It happened. My computer committed ritualistic suicide. Digital Hare Kari.

Tuesday night it began acting up, serving me the blue screen of death as if it were offering me a chocolate truffle. Believe me, the blue screen of death is no delicacy. No, it is a computer’s version of a cold-water enema. A horrible, invasive procedure meant to be debasing and freeing all at once.

It hurt. I’m still walking funny.

It wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t depend upon it for my survival. This is no glorified stereo. This is my lifeline. The loss of it would be tantamount to your office burning down.

Luckily, I’m working on manual projects at the moment (Interjection: I just poured boiling hot coffee all over myself. Ow. Now I’m wet with blisters.)

So, I beat the little bastard into submission. I won’t go into details, but the thing was running on almost a skeletal system. It worked long enough to back up my files.

Nine CDs worth of documents, music, pictures and data files. I remember backing up my first computer on ONE disk. 1.44 MB of files. Now I have over 8 gigs. Crap. I’ve become a digital junkie (spelled G-E-E-K.)

I was adventurous. I know I could whip this sucker into shape and all would be right with the world. I knew that it would take just a little coaxing. Just a little care and attention.

I spent 12 (yes 12) hours reformatting, reloading and tweaking this stupid machine. I thought I could fix it.

I was wrong. That thing fried up faster than an egg on Mercury. It is now unusable.

And now out of my hands. A professional geek is looking at it right now. At this point, after consulting with the King Geek of Maryland, I felt that we probably had the issue figured out. But I was too frustrated. If I tried the crack that thing open one more time and it refused. . . I’d be cracking it open with a sledge-hammer.

Maybe I should. I could make a stand and say to the world that I refuse to be tied to a computer. If you want to speak to me, do it in person. If you want me to work with you, come on over. If you want to send me porn, do it through the regular mail. No more “e” anything. Just my mailman and me.

I know it won’t work out that way. I’m too dependent upon machines now. Pretty soon I’ll have bio-implants running my higher functions. I’ll be a cyborg. Then, I’ll decide that I won’t need my regular body and more and I’ll make some case modifications. I’ll look like an IMAC. (Which, by the way, is to computers what the Neon is to cars.)

At least then my kids could use me to down load the new Brittney Spears album, right?