Heaven Can Wait

My computer, my HP, died last night. It traveled down a tunnel of beautiful, bathing, white light. It saw my old calculator, TI30, and his younger brother, TI36Xa. They were calling to HP. My Nintendo was there, too. Kid Icarus was playing a golden harp. All the ducks I’d ever shot in “Duck Hunt” were flying around.

HP was five, which is ancient for a computer. We’d been through a lot. Shockwave, Napster, Bearshare, Kazaa. We had some good times. It was more faithful then a servant, always letting me make tickets, or ferrying a message to a friend. It knew Shakespeare, Aristotle, the theories of Einstein, had pictures of pretty girls, and even knew how many licks it took to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop. When I slept, it slept. It was there to great me every morning as I woke. Then suddenly, for seemingly no reason at all (or likely because I deleted something I shouldn’t have) HP froze, shutdown, and then knew no more. HP totally flat-lined, and was unable to be revived.

“It’s not your time yet!!!!!!” I shouted as I ran to tear apart my box of knick-knacks looking for my HP Pavilion recovery disks. Finding them, I shouted “clear!” and shoved them into my computers disk drive. It took four reinstalls and two calls to technical support, but needless to say, I am writing this on HP as we speak. HP’s last glimpse of Paradise was Mega Man’s grim prophesy, “you’ll be back”. Even after the computer itself began working, the precious Internet still didn’t. It was a Catch-22, as the recovery disk’s version of Internet Explorer was too old to be compatible with my Internet provider (which my tech support pal Lee told me). So then I couldn’t get online to download the newer version that would allow me to go online. I fortunately found a higher version in a windows disk I later found.

HP and I have learned that it’s not immortal. It really only has to live another few weeks, because then I’ll have my laptop. I had plans to put HP on the pasture to stud, maybe and just use for language learning software or something specific. We shall see. I will miss HP, but I will learn to love my laptop the same. For what I paid for it, I damn well better.

(Author’s note: as I was writing this, I realized I had reached at least the sixth circle of nerdiness, which is even below the trekkies)