Me vs. Technology

My hard drive recently crashed and crashed hard.  One minute it was fine, the next there wasn’t even enough of it left to give me a Blue Screen of Death.  All my stories, all my work for my recent book blog tour, all of it was on that drive.  I (foolishly) had very little of it backed up.

If I had been on my own, I would have thought it all irrevocable…or, at least, only revocable if I was willing to shell out a lot of money that I don’t have to a data recovery service.  Thank goodness I was not on my own.  My husband Pete is far more knowledgeable than I about pretty much everything technology-based.  He was able to put my hard drive on life support with a flash drive of Ubuntu, and extracted all my files.  I ordered a new hard drive on Amazon, and while I breathlessly awaited its arrival, I worked on my book tour materials as my computer ran off of Ubuntu on a flash drive sticking out of one side, and saved on a second flash drive sticking out from the other.  Fine for documents, not enough for internet.

When my hard drive arrived, Pete spent several hours installing it, installing Ubuntu, and troubleshooting it when the operating system refused to play ball with my WiFi.  The fact that I am posting this right now is testament to his time and abilities.  I still periodically call him over when Ubuntu confounds me.

 “Pete, how do I restart?”

“Pete, how do I install software?”  

“Pete, why is my screen dark?”

I swear, the man has the patience of a thousand saints.

I’ve never been particularly good at computers.  I took two computer courses at Yale: EE 101, which is the gut to end all guts, and a java class, which I took credit/D/fail, and which I am still convinced I didn’t utterly fail only because one of the TAs was a friend of mine.  And it’s gotten worse as computers have developed and my knowledge of them has not.  I can do a very basic HTML, enough that if I was writing this post in text only, I would know how to insert that picture of a keyboard out there with an img src= .  But modifying my blog on WordPress?  Figuring out how to use Hootsuite?  Trying to set up my gmail so that I don’t have to log out and log back in whenever I want to switch between my main account and my Apex Magazine account?  I’m shocked I still have hair left!

Thank God for Pete, patron saint of the technologically clueless.