JOSePHInE: A Tragic Love Story

            I was recently the victim of some computer problems. This doesn’t sound like the makings of a good story, but I think there is something to be learned from how it affected me and how I dealt with it.

            First, I should explain that my computer is named JOSePHInE (Jacob’s Own Self-Produced Home Information Engine, yes it’s lame, but I like it), and she is very special to me. I built her a little over a year ago and we have had many good times since. She has always been healthy and well behaved and this is the first problem we have had.

Sexy

            It all started with a few crashes of my system. At first I thought this was due to the KotOR game that I had recently started replaying, which was a distressing problem on its own. A more problem was made obvious when we had trouble booting up. The true source was in JOSePHInE’s hard drive, which the motherboard was having problems finding. To be specific, it was her solid state drive (SSD), which is the smallest of her three hard drives, but the one with the operating system on it. This was surprising since I figured the SSD would be more reliable that her hard disk drives (HDD), one of which is about ten years old. JOSePHInE was still capable of lucid operations for about an hour at a time, so after much fiddling, and unplugging and replugging wires, and endless blowing on contacts, I determined that a transplant would be necessary. JOSePHInE helped me order up a new SSD and then I let her rest and the waiting started.

I'd say about 99% of the physical side of computer repair is plugging thing in

            A kind of depression soon set in to my life as I realized how attached I had become to my computer. I suddenly had a lot of free time that I didn’t know how to spend. I started cooking elaborate meals more often, watching all of my directors commentaries that I hadn’t seen yet (yes, I like directors commentaries), and playing my X-box more often, but it wasn’t the same. I missed my girl; all the things we used to do together, the things she enabled me to do, and just the sound of her in my apartment. I’m talking about her like she was my girlfriend, and that is actually a strong analogy for our relationship. I spent a large amount of my free time with her, I spent money on her with frequent “gifts”, and she was also my primary source of sexual stimulation (that is a pornography reference, not a sex with an inanimate object reference, just so you know where I draw the line).

            After just over a week of cursing my decision not to pay for fast shipping, the new SSD finally arrived. I began the transplant surgery with JOSePHInE acting as a more than able operating assistant (there’s not a lot she can’t teach me with a Google search). This reminded me of the scene from Star Trek when Spock losing his brain and then ends up assisting McCoy in the re-implantation (it was a pretty terrible episode, but a fun idea). JOSePHInE was amazingly sober during the process and was pulling flawless reboots and other actions which I didn’t think she could still do. After a few stressful hours of work we were able to clone her old hard drive onto the new one and got the whole system running normally again. It has only been two days now, but the crashes have not returned and I am happy to have my baby back to her old self again.