JULY 10, 2024 – If you read my immediately preceding post, you know that at yesterday’s close, I was in a celebratory mood. Despite Sisyphean odds, I’d managed to drag my MacBook Pro up a steep hill of technological glitches all the way to the summit of technological fixes. From that vantage point, the seemingly insurmountable obstacles on the climb had diminished into mere words of a story, much as extreme physical pain, once past, is nothing more than a figment of memory. With exuberance I declared a hero, the Apple “Genius” who’d restored my MacBook Pro without the loss of a single file—or solitary dollar to a pricey data recovery firm. With reckless abandon, I proclaimed, “America. What a great country.”
The party lasted until 11:22 a.m. CDT this morning. The moment came nearly two-and-a-half hours after I’d re-loaded the wholly recovered, fully revived device and re-installed my essential work apps, etc., etc., which necessitated devising new passwords, re-establishing administrative protocols, security systems, and so on. In the course of this plodding effort, I developed a modicum of technological self-esteem: I might’ve allowed one or two ssshhhh _ _ _ _ t(s) to air-brush the back of my incisors, but without losing my cool altogether, I navigated around a few snags here and there to reach the finish line victorious—though in a spirit of full disclosure, I must acknowledge that my principal competitor on the track was . . . me.
As I patted myself on the back with my right hand, I closed the MacBook screen with my left. Then, after moving from one chair to another, I opened the screen back up. In place of my neatly ordered desktop folders suspended against a backdrop featuring a soothing bucolic scene . . . an orange caution triangle harboring a nasty exclamation mark—no longer against a blue sky and verdant rolling countryside but surrounded by utter BLACKNESS, which as our fifth grade art teacher informed us, is the “absence of light.”
* * *
I apologize for belaboring my personal technology challenges. We’ve “all been there before”—not only muttering, often yelling, expletives but boring people in the telling of our phone fits, WiFi woes, and computer crashes. In the case of our sons, however, I’m sure my frantic texts and phone calls about technology troubles are the opposite of boring; they’re cause for great concern that normally calm, cool, collected Dad has gone temporarily insane. From the perspective of clinical psychology, such an assessment of my mental condition late this morning might well have been valid.
At precisely 11:23 a.m. CDT, I sent one of our two very tech-savvy sons (both of whom knew about my latest challenges—and (apparent) victory) the following text:
Guess what just happened!!!!! I closed my “new Mac,” then reopened and it went dead with a giant alert and the prompt, “Recovery needs to be reinstalled.” I can’t believe it!!!!!
He knows that I rarely use an exclamation mark in any of my writing, formal or informal. Never have I used five such marks in a row—and twice in the same text, no less(!) He didn’t respond, however. Either he figured it was best for me to recover on my own or he was calling my wife to discuss intervention. I waited for the inevitable text or phone call from her checking to make sure I didn’t pose a clear and present danger to myself or others. I cooled off with a tall glass of freshly squeezed lemonade on the rocks, bolstered with lime juice and waited a few minutes. No calls or texts. The silence was the foreshadowing of a gremlin on the loose.
Hmmm, I thought meanwhile. I could be smashing the MacBook into tiny bytes . . . I mean, bits . . . all over our concrete driveway, and my wife wouldn’t know until she returned home. But then she’d have to restrain me—how? With what? So she’d call 9-1-1 and tell the dispatcher I’d gone crazy over my malfunctioning laptop, and the dispatcher would ask if I had a gun, and my wife would say, “No, but he’s got a baseball bat and thinks his iPhone is a baseball and is about to hit it over the neighbor’s house.” Two minutes later two squads, an EMT van, a pumper and hook-and-ladder would come screaming down the street to our house. The bill for the commotion would top $10,000.
“You can put the bat down, sir,” a cop would say in a calm voice as he patted the air in front of him, palms down. “I know exactly how you feel; been there myself many times. Best thing is to put the weapon down—personally, I prefer a sledge hammer, but I’ve been known to use my service revolver, if you really want to know the truth.”
I returned to my senses and hit the “Recovery – Reinstall” button. What I saw next was the same screen that I’d seen after Jordan, yesterday’s Apple genius, had initiated the reinstall. A bar appeared—again, just as it had yesterday—with a time estimate of “5 hours, 43 minutes.” The actual wait time was closer to 15 minutes. I proceeded through the rest of the recovery process successfully, yet was certain I’d have to reload all the apps/set-ups/folders that I’d installed before the bizarre crash at 11:22. Mysteriously, all the apps had survived the inexplicable malfunction and recovery. My desktop looked just as neat as it had at 11:21. The machine functioned just fine ever since—except, whenever it timed out and asks for my password to reopen, it does so quickly but then claims it had to “restart.” I chuckle at the subsequent prompt, “Do you want to send a note to Apple?” No, as a matter of fact, I do not. Oh yes, another exception: when I plugged in the power cord, the MacBook “up” and died again, requiring a full re-install.
Now comes another mystifying element of today’s sequence. After the foregoing commotion had subsided and I’d returned from my hour-long walk-with-hill-climbs over in Little Switzerland, I noticed that my phone had been placed in “Do Not Disturb” mode—as had my laptop. In the three or four years I’ve owned the phone, not once have I turned on that mode. Nor have I ever placed any device on “Do Not Disturb” mode. I’ll send a follow-up text to our son, but instead of inserting five exclamation marks, I’ll use five question marks—and let him ask (now that my phone is out of “Do Not Disturb” mode) what those signify about my mental condition.
In any event, the technological self-esteem I’d acquired this morning—before things went dark—is proving to be fragile. My faith in the “good as new” MacBook Pro has been shaken irretrievably. Accordingly, I’m back where I started: I have an appointment at the “genius” orchard tomorrow at 12:15 p.m. CDT. I haven’t the technological knowledge or imagination to assume the problem can be “fixed” to my satisfaction. Nor do I have the patience to risk wasting additional time on more bites of a . . . rotten Apple.
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
