Thank-You Slow Decline

I had that moment of panic when I realized my computer was dying. It all came to a head when the spinning beach ball of death was looming ominously and I was unable to Force Quit applications normally. So I ended up manually turning off my computer, and when I tried starting it up again I got a flashing folder with a question mark on it instead of the normal Apple icon. [Pause.] Not a good sign. So I turned off my computer to let it rest and cursed myself about the files I had yet to back up. Suddenly I was quite religious, praying that my computer would let me access it one last time so I could transfer my files to an external hard drive. Luckily, my computer wasn’t quite dead yet (just mostly dead, like in The Princess Bride.)

Eventually I was able to gain access to my computer and transfer (although slowly) files that I definitely wanted to keep. I quickly came to the conclusion that a new computer was necessary, but I wanted to wait until the weekend to get one since I knew it would take some time to set everything up. So for the couple of days I still used my old computer, I treated it with kid gloves. I was paranoid of having it crash on me, so I did my best not to overwork it; I would only open one application at a time, and every two hours of work I did on my computer equated to two hours of it being off so it could rest. It made for some ineffective work methods, but at least my computer didn’t crash. [Half-hearted: yay.]

While my dying computer brought me much stress, I was grateful for its slow decline. If it would have just died suddenly, then I would have lost work that I would have had to then redo (which would have irritated me greatly). So if it had to die (as all things must eventually), I’m glad it was a long drawn out death because it was just much more convenient for me.