RIP Little Gadget

My computer is dead. My poor sweet little acer aspire one is no more. She wouldn't turn on the other day. I used all my powers, then all my nerdly husband's powers, but we couldn't get a heartbeat. Gadget's guts contained many things... including the non-backed up copy of a paper that is due on Tuesday.

Well, it was backed up, but last week's version of it.

Also, all my emails, email addresses, countless files of school work, academic googogs, photos, a proposal... my entire life outside of the bedroom essentially. When it happened, an me facing a deadline (or seven), I panicked. I felt like Dr. McCoy when he and Kirk beamed aboard the Klingon ship to try to save General Kang. There I was, straddling the laptop version of a tiny little Klingon and the best hope for galactic peace in my lifetime... pounding on it's chest. The only thing missing was the globules of pepto-bismol pink blood and Christoper Plummer yelling at me. I kept pounding on it daying, "C'mon dammit, breathe!" But nothing.

"Dammit Jim, I'm a grad student, not a computer engineer."

So I called Nerds On Site. They sent a fifth-level half orc mage with a million experience and two charisma to my appartment. He wasn't pretty to look at but he knew his shit.

Gadget could either be sent to the manufacturer and returned in working order with an 80% chance of having all my files in tact OR we could crack open her still warm corpse and retrieve my data in time to hand in assignments.

"I'll get the sledgehammer."

Sigh... Here's the thing. I DO run backups. But they had been buggy for a couple of weeks and I was too busy to work out the kinks on my desktop. I learned the hard way. MAKE BACKUPS A PRIORITY PEOPLE.

Let's see, so that's $550 for the laptop, + $120 for the awesome 6 hour battery (which totally delivered, btw), another$280 for three hours of the nerd's time = $1050 + tax for me to have a laptop for 7 months.

I know that they won't do anything for me, and I will probably get laughed at, possibly before I hang up the phone. But I still might call acer and yell at them anyway. I need to mourn. But there is no time.

Gadget, you may be dead... but this desktop has essentially mind-melded with you. If I've learned anything from Star Trek is that rebooting the series is always possible. And your consciousness can live on indefinitely in the hard-drive/brain of another computer until Kristy Alley goes to rehab and the genesis project is released.

Say it with me: "KAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHNNNNNN!!!!"