In this day and age, anyone younger than 30 is supposed to know what they are doing when it comes to working with the newest technology. It makes sense, the people who should know the most about such technological things should be the ones who grew and matured with the changes. So, as a participant in such a generation, I try as hard as I can to fake this knowledge all the while hoping that I don't ultimately break the piece of technology. In this version of my struggles, I will recount for you only two different times (among many others) that I have pushed my computer to become so infuriated by my ineptitude at solving problems that it just shuts down.
The rage of my computer begins with an innocent night of watching Downton Abbey. I was emotionally trekking through the end of the third season when the finale came with the car crash and the baby.... whyyy Dan Stevens?! Anyways, when the episode ended, I immediately picked up the DVD case for the fourth season that I had so intelligently thought to rent from my local library before I had finished the third. I sighed and wiped away my tears for I was going to watch the next episode and everything was going to get better, right? WRONG.
As I
pressed the eject key, I held out my hand to catch the disk that would come
out. My computer spun the disk a few times and made the creaking sounds that
normally signaled that the DVD was being ejected. On my screen appeared a
message telling me that the disk had been ejected.
But guess
what? Nothing happened. There was no disk ejected into my waiting hand.
No big deal, I told myself. I simply pressed the button again and waited as the computer ran through the same motions.
Yet, the disk still didn't eject and the message once again appeared on my screen that it had. Calmly, as I couldn't lose my patience yet, I went to my tool bar and choose the 'Eject Disk' option. Still nothing. At this point, my computer was taunting me. So, I shut it down. I decided that it needed a break to relax and breathe for maybe then I would get the disk back. But, apparently that choice only made my computer more spiteful.
Gritting my teeth and narrowing my eyes, I restarted my computer and after letting everything load, I clicked the eject button again. It was going to work, I could feel it. The buzz that signaled the eject function began. The computer was thinking, spinning the disk, wondering if it should give me the satisfaction of having solved the problem on my own.
Well, it didn't. After resisting the urge to throw the computer against the wall to simply break it and retrieve the disk that way, I passed the problem on to my parents. And do you know how they got the disk out? They molded a paper clip into a hook and pulled the disk out. Seriously. It was that simple. Their fix took all of five minutes. And when they tested ejecting a different disk from my computer, it worked flawlessly.
My next story is of a more recent night when I was calmly getting ready for bed. I had just closed my computer and was in the midst of turning down the covers on my bed when I heard a loud buzzing sound. At first I thought it was an alarm going off somewhere in my apartment complex. I froze. What was I supposed to do? It was the middle of the night so was I to go wake up my roommate? Would we have to evacuate the building? The buzzing ceased before my various worries could go any further. Confused, I peeked out my window to see that everything was as it was before the sound. It was then that I looked back at my computer.
The soft white light that normally breathes steadily when the computer is asleep was blinking furiously. Oh no... I muttered to an empty room. Slowly, I opened my computer to find a dark, blank screen. I pressed a couple buttons, trying to wake it up, but the screen remained off. My eyes widened as my breathing became more frantic. I clicked the keypad and more buttons while my computer groaned.
This was it. I had officially killed my computer. I would have to pour all of the money I had left in my sad college-student account into buying a new computer. But the worst part was that I had probably just lost all of the important documents that I hadn't known how to save to the mystical thing they call the 'Cloud'.
This tale of woe flowed around me all in the span of ten minutes. TEN whole minutes at two o'clock in the morning passed before my computer suddenly decided to show me a single loading bar. It was that awful purgatory where one isn't sure if the computer will return you to your home screen or if the breathing light will slowly die out. I waiting, wringing my hands like my grandma does when she's nervous. The loading bar finally completed and, much to my relief, I was able to sign into my computer. I watched as everything began to reboot and reload. When it was all back to normal and all of my documents were saves and settled, I began to close things down once more. Then, in the corner of my screen, my computer sent another message: "Updates installed."
WHAT UPDATES?! I had never even been alerted to any updates nor had I clicked on any pop-ups to install them. Shaking my head in a mixture of confusion and relief, I shut the cover on my computer. As I climbed back into bed, from my computer came a sigh. Later when I investigated, I couldn't even find anything that would've been improved or changed by these supposed updates. What I had done to incite the computers wrath so much that it had shut down to install updates without telling me, I will never know.
