When the Technology "Breaks:" If it Isn't ONE Thing, it's Another!

My computer was dead, this morning.

That is to say, when I came downstairs to my home office and got ready to start my day, my computer had turned itself off in the middle of the night. It's not supposed to do that; it's just supposed to enter "sleep mode."

Not a good way to start the day!

It took unusually long for it to boot up again, but I paid it no major mind... thinking there had probably been a Microsoft Windoze update during the night.

In time, it did come back up... but the strange thing was that all my saved settings, all my cookies, all my saved passwords, all other personalized stuff seemed to be gone.

Meaning that I pretty much had to start from scratch, accessing email and various other apps. It was almost as if I was using a version of my system that had never had a user before!

Although I felt a little unsettled by it, I was relieved that it had come back up and I could at least work, a little. I depend on being online for my living... what little "living" I have.

Strangely enough — after I had been working for a little while, trying to make sense of it all — all my settings suddenly reappeared out of nowhere.

It all made me a little more interested in looking for some kind of global password wallet... that stores somewhere in the cloud, not locally. Of course, many conspiracy theorists would insist that that's precisely what "they" want to happen.

"Not your keys, not your crypto" expanded to cover our entire lives.

On the other hand, hardware is fallible. Where do you keep your "sensitive" stuff, then?

Then... just as I was starting to get back into my work routine... I am suddenly staring at a black screen with system dialog messages. With no particular warning...

As best I can tell, I am looking at a fairly imminent hard disk failure here... something that will not only require a trip to the local computer "fix-it shop," but will also cost a good bit of money.

At best they will be able to pull the data from the partially functioning drive and transfer it to a new drive and I can keep going for a while. My computer is getting older... and it was only a matter of time before it would need to be replaced.

At worst I will have to buy an entire new system and accept that some of my work will be lost. Thankfully, I have an "image" backed up on my still working backup drive that has all my working files, but I only do a "big" backup once a month... and guess what? It's the 30th, and my last backup was on November 1st!

Oh well...

In the meantime, I am sitting here on my rather ancient laptop, which is OK but hardly ideal for doing my work.

It all made me stop and wonder just how many people out there are already struggling because of Covid-lockdowns and lacking income due to furloughs and job layoffs... while still having to deal with the expenses of life that invariably come our way.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin hit a new all-time high! Makes me wish I still had some of the Bitcoin I paid well under $1000 for, way back when.

Well, that's about it, for this update. I wonder how many posts I would have to write to fund a new computer? Just kidding... back in the days of $20 posts, that might have been a real and viable option... but this is now!

Thanks for reading!

As always, comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — NOT A CROSSPOST!!!)
Created at 20201130 19:20 PST
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