COLUMN: C:/Requiem

From Max Page's "Office Hours," Fall '95 scendent moment when my apple cider met my Apple. With four days left before my dissertation had to meet the Margin Lady (the woman who measures the margins on dissertations -- the real power in the Graduate School), the apple cider, with the aid of my hand, began a rehearsal of the law of gravity, only to be intercepted on its inevitable trip to the floor by the absorbability of my Macintosh 160. Like a waffle drinking up maple syrup, my laptop slurped itself into a drunken, short-circuited state. The motherboard was wasted. There is nothing quite like the death of a computer. The terror that struck me as I watched the apple cider follow its course down into the depths of my laptop was unhinging. I got tunnel vision; my head spun; time stopped. I had not simply lost 2000 dollars; it was something more essential, a piece of me. Though I have weathered this dark time, I suffer still from the post traumatic stress syndrome associated with the passing of my computer. My roommate recently was faced with a trauma less dramatic but no less destabilizing than my apple cider debacle. After installing a seemingly innocent printer driver (never trust a driver you don't personally know), he found his system "corrupted." Apple is no gentle company: A dead machine gets not the happy smiling Mac, but a "sad Mac" -- mouth drooping and eyes crossed out and a funeral dirge sound effect, in case you weren't quite sure of your fate. The sudden tragedy, striking so suddenly and to someone so young, sent my roomate into a fit of breast-beating and garment-shredding. I half expected him to start sitting shiva for the Powerbook. With great sympathy, I asked the psychologically appropriate question for this moment: "But you have backups, right?" That broke him. My encounter with the debilitating effects of cider gave me courage to stand and fight the good fight. Out came my Norton Utilities. With geeky Peter Norton's image flitting about the screen, repairing and cleaning, massaging the Powerbook back to life, Bertie awoke, as if from the dead. He watched in wonder as each second more and more of his hard drive was rescued. For some instinctual reason I chose that moment to ask him if I could borrow his bike while he was gone in New York City for a medical school rotation. "Good time to ask me for something," he said. I got the bike, and the stereo, and the cordless phone. As the computer whirred back to life, icons in place, and desktop unmarred, Bertie got on the phone to literally acquire some piece of mind: a new external hard drive. A life had been made safer. Human beings have perfected the art of grieving. We have learned elaborate methods of coping with the cycles of life and death which take relatives and friends, pets and homes. The world's religions retain their adherents in large part because they offer ritualized formulas for individuals and their communities to grieve, so that they can soon return to the task of living. Natural disasters run their course and, after duly lamenting the destruction of people and property, we rebuild and prepare for the next hurricane or tornado. Cars disintegrate, bicycles rust, glasses break. We mop up and move on. No matter how much we love the passing family member, or are attached to the childhood home, these people and objects are ultimately outside of ourselves. But the computer, mysterious and elusive a machine as it is, is a part of us. It has become, like it or lot, an annex of our brain. Once people thought human memory was lodged somewhere in the liver; now we know its in the hard plastic case that sits on your desk. Everything I wrote and thought for the past three years lay on my dearly departed 160 (and, fortunately, on an external drive, and on disks mailed to distant relatives across the country). My address book, my calendar, my class notes, student grades (!), scanned photographs of friends and family, checkbook, dissertation chapters, job letters, all were on that drive. Though we know our brains are tangible -- soft, moist masses the consistency of butter -- we don't really believe it. And though we know about chips and ports and active matrix, daughter boards and zip drives, the notion that those pieces of metal and plastic should add up to the data of our lives seems ludicrous. Having found where a piece of my soul really resides, I have learned to treat my life with greater respect. Helmet on while biking, vitamin C in the morning, squash or tennis in the afternoon. No more Billybob cheesesteaks and late-night chicken-wings. And no cider near the laptop.