Maudlin Monday

Yesterday, while my PC was booting up, it hung. It was around 9pm.

Not quite the way I wanted to wind down for the evening.

After several failed attempts at rebooting, I opened the casing of the CPU, wiped off a bit of dust - how does all that stuff find its way in? - and rebooted it again, sans a couple of USB extension cables.

Success - and out came the external hard drives.

This episode was significant because it finally drove home the realities of our flagging economy. This, along with the fact that I paid about RM12 more for a water filter element last weekend as opposed to last year.

This wasn't a good time for the PC to start failing. Things breaking down and requiring repair or replacement almost always happens when 1) I'm too busy; 2) I need to use the damn things at the moment; 3) the money needs to go somewhere else, or 4) I'm broke.

The renewed realisation of how much I'm dependent on these devices frightens me.
Not long ago, I was babysitting two of these: the desktop and a laptop computer. Now, it's the desktop and a smartphone, which I adopted nearly fourteen years since I bought my first mobile phone, a Nokia 3310 that only began showing its age middle of last year.

They just don't make 'em like that anymore. If these weren't meant to last you'd think they'd be a little cheaper.

So I guess this is a call to action. I've made several such calls for one reason or another (which were ignored for one reason or another) but I think This Is It.

Time to save - and bid a sad temporary farewell to some favourite haunts. Time to declutter all the junk in the PC and the apartment. Time to increase my net worth - #2kerja, here I come?

Maybe it's also time to take the computer to the shop, provided that the problem persists. I've asked around and concluded that it could be the CMOS battery, but it could also be the hard drive.

Of course, now I tend to be afraid to boot up the machine. So while it was working, I scheduled a blog post for tomorrow after backing up all the files. The post will have cats in it because I - as well as the rest of the Internet - need to feel better, probably after the news.

(It's been a while since I wrote things like this. Maybe because I didn't see the point of it.)