I'd been warned before but I never thought it could happen to me. A single push of a button has threatened to erase two and a half years of my past.
All I did was hard-boot my computer.
You aren't supposed to do that. You are always supposed to shut down your machine properly. Usually, I do. But sometimes things freeze up and you have to hard-boot. I would estimate I've had to manually reboot my computer three times a week since 1992, on average.
I'd done it five thousands time without consequences. Why should this happen now? Consider the odds.
The fates have abandoned me.
I had just done the finishing touches on a paper. I had Instant Messenger, two Internet Explorer Browsers, Microsoft Word and Notepad all running. I started to print out the paper. A skeleton in my closet craved the Dashboard Confessional: Unplugged album and decided to open Winamp in mid-printing session.
Curse you, Chris Carrabba. That final program was too much for my nearly three-year old machine, and my screen froze. I brought up Task Manager, only to be received by an all-too familiar shade of blue.
All of this because of a Dashboard Confessional album. It figures that emo-kids would be the death of my baby. I didn't know how bad it was, though. I manually rebooted my computer with the innocence of a four-year old.
This time, Windows refused to load. Confusion. Panic. Pure fear. At the time, I thought my paper would be due in eight hours. (Fortunately, it wasn't.)
I called a friend for help. We decided to take out the hard drive and attempt to recover the files on my friend's computer. I hadn't taken my baby out of her tower since the last time this sort of thing happened, in June. She was so dusty inside. I felt bad for neglecting her.
We thought we could recover the files. Everything would be all right.
Hope has sprung a perfect dive, a perfect day, a perfect lie.
The Chris Carrabba Curse struck twice. My own password prevented us from recovering the files. I had passworded my username on Windows XP, and my friend's copy of XP refused to grant us access to the files. I can see them, I know they are there, but I can't touch them.
Imagine your soul trapped in a glass jar, six inches out of reach.
It makes me sick to my stomach. I haven't just lost saved-game files and my Internet Explorer "Favorites" list. Six months of stolen music are now gone. I've lost everything I've written since June. Poems I can't remember and columns that never went to print have maybe disappeared forever. I've lost digital photographs of friends and family that exist nowhere else.
In a way, it is as though I am the one who received a memory wipe. The fates cast six-dozen hard-drive errors down my college experience. Whatever I did to deserve this, I am sorry.
I know what I did to deserve this. I bought, listened to, and enjoyed a Dashboard Confessional album. This is your hard-drive. This is your hard-drive on emo. Any questions?
Chris Carrabba has won. He conquered my computer. Well, Chris, does it comfort you to know you fought the good fight?
Write to Mouse at bbmcshane@bsu.edu
Visit www.classicalgeektheatre.com
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