Broken Computer

For a writer like me, who has hundreds of floppy disks loaded with novels, essays and book proposals, who has a twelve-year-old computer with a hard drive loaded with same, a computer breakdown is devastating. That's what happened to me this weekend. My computer, Old Sparky, couldn't read my floppy drive. It was making all sorts of crazy sounds.

So, on Monday I carried it into a repair shop. The young man who was going to work on this dinosaur took one look at my computer and started laughing. "Are you freakin' kiddin' me?!" he said.

"No kidding," I answered. I got down on my knees and pleaded with him to save my progeny. "For the love of God," I said, "have mercy. My life is inside this machine!"

The kid told me I could watch him work. He placed my computer on an operating table, removed a screwdriver from his hip pocket, unscrewed a few little nuts, and the popped the cranium open like a pistachio. "Oh, yeah," he said, "this is interesting!"

"What? Is it cancer?" I asked.

"No, no . . . ." He reached inside the floppy drive with his two inch-long fingernails and pulled out an assortment of tiny particles (wire, plastic, the head off of a floppy disk). "You're not going to need a new floppy, I'll bet. Let's plug it back in and and see if it works."

We did. And it did.

"You know," he told me afterwards while I was recovering by drinking a glass of orange juice and eating a cookie, "these old machines are built much better than the new ones. If you take care of this, it should last you another ten years."

"I'm counting on it," I said. "Just like I'm counting on another ten years from my wife. But after that, all bets are off. I'll get a newer, younger model."

"As long as the fans hold up, it will last," he told me. "Heat is what kills the computer."

I didn't have the heart to tell him that my wife was suffering from heat-related issues. Going through the change, I had to wonder . . . how long would she hold up?