Data seizures
My computer is very ill. It is afflicted with abrupt seizures of restarting itself. There is no apparent cause for these fits. All of the sudden, with no warning at, the screen flashes black and then flickers as the BIOS goes to work counting up the RAM.
This illness is disturbing. With no hints as to what triggers the restarts, there is no way to avoid them and nowhere to start looking for a remedy. The worst of it is the distrust the malfunctioning creates: the uncertainty of a sudden restart, coupled with the time it takes for the machine to boot up—made much longer by the disk checking necessitated by the incorrect shutdown—makes even using the computer distasteful.
The first time the computer spontaneously restarted itself, I was faced with one of the most dreaded error notices I’ve ever encountered.
OS not found.
This means there’s something wrong with the hard disk. The hard disk contains a mark of everything that is done on the computer. It holds within itself the concentrated product of both time and heart-rending effort. It is the bilation of one’s creative vein, the ablation of the only thing a human can’t take back, time itself.
I try to explain to Elexa the feeling of working on a computer that could lose everything, irreparably, without warning or provocation.
“It is as if you were writing in your journal with ink that might all of the sudden turn invisible,” I say.
“I understand. I know the feeling,” she says.
Her journals are the most precious things she owns. With her bag, which was stolen in Barcelona last summer, she lost journals containing, as she put it, three months of her life.
---
