No POST · 25 July 2020
My computer broke a while back. It would not POST.
For those of you not in the know. POST is an acronym that stands for Power On Self Test. (I had to look it up too.) It is that beep you hear when you first turn on your PC. (I am not sure if it is that sound you hear when you first turn on your Mac though.) Anyway. (If I put in any more parenthetic thoughts, this could get long and difficult to read.) As I was saying before I interrupted myself. My computer would not POST not long ago. In other words, my computer was broken.
Thankfully, I had nothing to fear. I had another computer to fall back on. Actually, we were sitting around (not much else to do when you are quarantined) when I was lamenting the loss of our computer. The boys said that we probably had at least 2 computers each. (They recognized that phones are indeed little computers.) And with tablets, we might even have 3 computers each. Anyway, I was just glad that I had scavenged a computer from a friend of mine. It is a beast of a machine. Four large hard drives (or at least they used to be considered large), four fans, and a huge case. Lots of lights and stuff too. Very cool. It used to be his gaming computer, but he was getting rid of it, so he gave it to me. Yes, I am a scrounger.
The problem was that the Beast was broken. Not down for the count, but I had not turned it on for quite some time. I knew what the problem was, or at least I thought I knew, but I had not fixed it yet. I had been meaning to (after all, it was going to replace the older computer), but had just not gotten around to it yet. Well, it was finally time to fix the problem. So I did. There was a pesky hard drive that was not behaving well with the other components in the box. So I gave it a time out. Turns out that the Beast would turn on with it connected. At least the last few times. But I decided to leave the hard drive in a permanent time out. Albeit, still in the computer.
The problem with fixing computers is that even when you think you know what the problem is, it takes time to diagnose and fix said problems. Which I did, but it took a couple days. And what does a writer do when his tech guy is fixing his computers? He still writes. However he can. Fortunately, I was able to get one computer up and running and the other one got up and running too. Strange, but wonderful. So now, I have two computers that work. And I am writing again. I did not miss too many beats. But I did sweat it out when I thought that maybe I lost a bunch of my data.
Well, to make a short story a little longer, I think all my data is intact. I now have two computers that work. (Albeit, the old one will just be a backup.) And I am back up and writing without much of a hitch.
One day, I might get a shiny new computer. But for now, I am just glad I get to hear that little beep in the morning. I get to hear my computer POST. Believe it or not, that beep is music to my ears.
© 2020 Michael T. Miyoshi
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