So! We’ve finished up posting Collections, the novel no one wanted to publish, and my strange brain won’t allow me to start a new weekly novel post here until 2024. Which leaves us with some weeks to fill here at the wee blog. But, luckily, life decided to screw me over this week and I suffered a computer crash for the ages, which I can now write about in hilarious detail.
Friendos, I am the Platonic Ideal of Intellectual Shallowness. I have a real skill: I am 100% that asshole who skims a Wikipedia article an hour before meeting you for drinks and then spends the evening confidently lecturing you on the subject. Maybe I’m the Platonic Ideal of Unearned Confidence? Nah, that’s just me being a white middle-aged cis man.
Anyways, I have a long history of fucking around and finding out when it comes to computers. My first PC was a Commodore 64, gifted to me by my parents when I was a wee lad and still filled with promise. Back then no one laughed when I told them I wanted to be a brain surgeon, and so my parents could be forgiven for thinking that the $200 in 1982 money was an investment in making me a billionaire computer genius. I mostly used the C64 to play video games, of course, amassing an enormous empire of pirated games utilizing a wide range of illegal programs that broke DRM. I also spent a lot of time typing programs directly into the RAM from computer magazines1. Naturally, none of these programs–which took days to keyboard–ever worked properly, and so I knew the bitter taste of computer failure very early on.
I bought my first real computer years later, and that’s when I started getting into trouble, because I got curious. Early attempts to dual-boot Windows and Unix resulted in many, many boot failures, and the thing was these all happened in 1998 or so. Imagine for a moment turning on your computer and getting a blinking cursor and nothing else, and you have zero other computers or access to online information. I had the Internet in some form, but with my PC blown to pieces by my tinkering I couldn’t get there. I had no smartphone or tablet, so I had to wait until the next day when I went to work, spend hours furiously Googling solutions, print out instructions, and go home to try everything until finally something actually worked2.
Twenty-five years later, things are very, very different.
This FileSystem Does Not Exist
My computer blew up on Monday evening. These things always happen at night, for some reason. Your computer never turns into a malformed paperweight when you’re up early and feeling clearheaded; it always discovers entropy when you’re tired and slightly drunk and trying to figure out if the tiny leprechaun named McSwiggins who keeps shouting that you have to BURN EVERYTHING, BOYO is real or not.
One moment I was editing the thumbnail images for the new episode of the podcast, the next I was staring at a reboot screen. Fine, I thought. Something got screwed up and I’d lose a few minutes of my time.
The computer made it to the desktop, then crashed again. This time I didn’t even get a POST. No BIOS. No nothing. It was very much as if my computer had simply ceased to exist. For a moment I worried that when I opened the case to peek inside, I’d find nothing but a note from some alternate timeline explaining that my Alternate Self had to steal my computer in order to save the future or something, and then I would be swallowed by a violent temporal anomaly and that would be that.
Now, in 1998 I had no way to access the vast troves of information out there on the Internet, but this is 2023, baby, and I have a phone, two old laptops, two old tablets, and my wife’s laptop. I had access to the information. I’m not afraid to assault my motherboard with a screwdriver and my sticky, whiskey-stained hands.
Nothing worked. The computer was dead. I pulled the hard drive out of it and hooked it up to an old laptop and confirmed I hadn’t experienced any data loss, which was calming, and then I decided to do a few basic triage steps to try to revive the computer: I resat the graphics card and the RAM, I checked all the plugs and connections. And then I thought I’d bleed the CMOS battery and clear that as well, which sometimes revives a confused motherboard.
Except, I couldn’t find the CMOS battery.
Now, if you don’t know anything about computer hardware that means nothing to you, but as a guy who has stared into the abyss of many non-functioning computers in his time, not being able to see the CMOS battery was disturbing. It’s normally a pretty simple process to unplug the CMOS and/or clear it with the jumpers, but here I couldn’t even see that fucker. I wondered, for a moment, if computer technology had progressed so far that they no longer used CMOS batteries, and I missed it because I am old and feeble.
I broke out the motherboard’s documentation, and discovered that the manufacturer had hidden the CMOS battery the way a Super Villain would have. The battery is a thin, disc-shaped thing, and they glued it to the back of another component, which was in turn obscured by another component. Salt in the wound: The plug was also buried behind something, and the only way to try to unplug it was to get in there with a pair of needles or something and use them like chopsticks. Which I did. I think I lost several pounds of body weight through sweat and anxiety.
You Have Failed
So, did I win? Well, a new computer has been ordered, so the answer is: No. That motherboard is fried and not coming back from the dead any time soon. Maybe it was the incendiary nature of my writing, my ideas too hot for the hard drive. Or maybe I just got unlucky. But the contrast with past computer problems was astonishing: Instead of losing everything on my hard drive and staying awake for six days straight as I tried to cobble together information to fix things, I … just used the Internet to learn everything I needed to know and retrieve any files I’d lost. What used to be a paralyzing moment of terror is now just a pain in the ass.
Except for that CMOS battery. That’s gonna haunt me to the end of my days.