Into the void

 The day started with disappointment.

“Hey did you move the sign?” My husband brought me the first cup of the day and bad news.

The sign, his gift to me, was a hand-painted, snake-shaped uterus and the words “The Don’t Tread on Me.” And evidently, it was missing from the end of our driveway where it had lived for two years and four months.

I shook my head and shrugged as I took the coffee. “I guess Scary Season is upon us.”

After I felt a smidge more human, I slithered out of bed and zombie-walked to my desk, where, still drowsy, I sat staring blanking into a blank screen staring back.

 

I slurped from my mug and absently tapped at the keys. I hover my chin over the mug and tap a little harder. The computer hadn’t awakened from its sleep. 

My eyes finally opened to full attention, and as I pushed all the dim possibilities from my thoughts, landing on a similar time in history when I had parked in front of the bus station to wait for a friend’s arrival … theatrically reading the sign plastered on the wall in front of me … I’d said it aloud, over and over, making my voice sound as strange and Muppet-like as I was able … until the words’ meaning suddenly settled in: “We’ve moved.”

Oh. No one was there to witness my chagrin as I turned the ignition key and followed the sign’s directions to the new station building. 

In my office, I reached behind the screen and blindly located the computer’s ignition switch to press it. After a moment, my breath caught as the starting chime was interrupted leaving the screen dark and lifeless.

Each new attempt at a fix - checking cord connections, and power sources, unplugging all peripheral instruments, and trying the steps again. 

Nothing.

 

Hard starts, safe starts, and jump starts never got off the ground. The hobgoblins of technology blocked each and every attempt at multi-key depressive reconciliation.

I’m not sure I could tell you what I might have given for just a momentary glimpse of color, even if it were the feared Blue Screen of Death.

After swishing another cup of three of java down my gullet, I called out the Independent IT Cavalry … who would be sending someone directly ... or perhaps as directly as a squirrel in rush-hour traffic. Things are busy right now.

I take deep breaths.

“This is no time to panic,” I tell myself, using my inner puppet voice for levity. I see no sense in getting all worked up when all isn’t lost … just yet.

But while I wait for the madness that I am sure will descend, I have other methods at my disposal.

I dig out my laptop, which I hope will allow me to work from a backup I have tended faithfully but never had to employ. I have no reason to believe it will work. At least not effortlessly. 

  

My mind may be in the early stages of hardening against the updates of software or losing the flexibility and muscle memory to adapt to programs that speak to Kids Today (I’m talking about you SnapChat) but I refuse to give up.

And so … I  convince myself, after careful Googling, I discover that when it comes to this alternate frontier, space is likely the issue. And I might be able to free up some of it and at least get some work accomplished, if I just press “Yes” on the button that appears for a second time, giving me one last chance to back out from performing a function that in plain text sounds as if it will, in one fell swoop, will magically, tragically, but entirely make everything inside my computer disappear like smoke into a Cloud.

And off it went. 

Into the void.

.

Just as I should have suspected. All I can do now is to get another cup of coffee, dig out some new sign board, and wait for the calvary. There’s nowhere to go but up.