The Blank Screen: A Modern Day Fable

The screen was black when I got home from the movies. No screensaver, just black. The kind of black it is when it's turned off. I looked down to see the bright green light on the port replicator assuring me that the computer was still on.

So I restarted. It wasn't a big deal. Once before, my computer had gotten stuck in the purgatory that existed between its standby and hibernating states. Though I thought I'd changed the setting so that my laptop would only hibernate when I was running off the battery. But that was so long ago, and this had been such a hectic year, I couldn't be sure.

The boot screen appeared, flashing the Dell logo. Then, rather than the familiar Windows XP Professional screen, there was a series of beeps, followed by the error message, "No primary hard drive found."

I blinked. Some glitch, I was sure. The hard drive hadn't gone anywhere. It was still in its slot just behind the headphone and PS/2 jacks.

I restarted.

"No primary hard drive found."

Naturally, I panicked. This couldn't be happening. My laptop was just fourteen months old, a baby compared to those of my friends. And the ones at work, six months older than mine and slightly less sophisticated. These were checked out to the students at the university. The frequency of use was much higher and often by people with no technological savvy. They were knocked off tables, turned off without the proper down, sealed shut by spilled cans of Coke. I had yet to see this error in them.

I called the Dell hotline. I read off my express service tag, and moments later, all of my personal information and that of my computer were on Megan's, the technician, computer screen.

"It could be that the hard drive has come dislodged," she told me. With her instruction, I removed the hard drive and immediately slipped it back into place. I restarted the computer.

"No primary hard drive found."

We tried resetting the system to its default settings to no avail. Megan pronounced my hard drive dead at approximately 11:29 p.m.

We arranged for the shipment of the new part, due to arrive two days later. I would only be without my computer for two days, she told me.

It was going to be tough. I was the kind of person who turned to my computer for everything. I, who actually used the address book in Windows, and ironically, just as I was to send change of address postcards. What was coming on TV tonight? I don't know, but I can look it up on the internet. A phone call for my roommate? The message recorded and sent via instant messenger, waiting for her when she returned home. A fifteen minute nap? Set the alarm on my computer. The new short story ideas in my head, waiting to be written. Two days without my beloved was going to be hell.

Not to mention the blank hard drive to be sent to me. It was going to be entirely empty. This in itself was not a problem. I still had all of the restoration discs that came with the computer, all sealed and in its original shipping box. I worked with computers; installing the drivers was going to be a cinch. It was everything else that was gone-the research papers and essays for school, the pictures, nearly 34 gigs of music. It was enough to make me nauseous.

Now, most of the papers could be recovered. I had every single paper written in grades nine through twelve in hard copy. I simply rescued them from the garbage sack in the corner of my room, ready to be thrown out as I cleaned out the storage closet. Papers from the first two years of college were on floppy disks and burned CDs, all in a neat box on my bookshelf.

It was the papers from the fourteen months that I owned my computer that had no backups. By the grace of God, I had gone three semesters without having to write anything of importance. The last semester had included a weekly writing assignment and six hardcore research papers. Being the current semester, I still had the hard copies, and several were still saved in my email. Only one paper I did not possess-the one submitted electronically which my professor had requested permission to use as an example for other students. So yes, all of my work could be restored.

Much the same with pictures. As I do not own a digital camera, I still had all of the photos that had been saved on my computer in their original, paper forms. Others were copied from the websites of friends and could be copied again. My diary in Word only contained three entries before I found my bound journal in a box under my bed. My original webpage was gone, but that was okay. I was in the planning stages of building a new one. I hardly worried about the music. It was easily obtainable. There was the matter of the songs I had paid to download and would have to pay to get again, but what was $2? It certainly wasn't going to put me in the poor house.

No, all of that was nothing. Small beans compared to other things. Things like my writing. My secret aspirations to be a writer. They were saved under the unassuming folder titled "Corporate Finance Project Files." But if anyone had bothered to look, it was void of Excel files. Instead, it contained password-protected Word files. My essays, short stories, my lone foray into poetry, my novel beginnings. My novel: finished, written in six months; edited, formatted, and refined over the next eight months. Three hundred ninety-three pages ready to be shipped to agents and publishers as soon as I was settled in my new house. It was good; the response from the readers of the site I had anonymously posted a short segment to assured me of that.

Perhaps the cruelest twist of fate is the fact that on my way home from the movie that night, I stopped at Target to buy blank CDs. For two weeks, the balloon had been hovering at the bottom right of my screen. "You have files waiting to be written to CD."

Each day, I impatiently clicked at the "X" and reminded myself to stop by the store to get them, but gas was expensive, and the stores were all across town. I was working insane hours in addition to finals. Finally, on my first free evening, I had gone to a movie and I had stopped to get the CDs. Brightly colored CDs-blue for pop, yellow for country, classical, and Christian, black for rock, red for R&B, and orange for data. The orange ones were at the top, and as I made my way across the living room, I was pulling one from the tall spindle of blank discs.

And now I am in my new house, in a new city, with my newly restored laptop, nothing to do in the six weeks before my job begins. The time when I should have been shopping my novel around to anyone who would read it. The document box and the stack of CDs taunt me from the desk. The novel is in my head, waiting to be written.

Again.

And the moral of this story? Something I always preached at the students in the computer center yet failed to heed in my life: back up your files!