I was up till nearly sunrise the other night, sleepless over the possible fate of Don Imus. Just kidding, of course. We knew almost for certain that the late, great king of crank was dead meat from the moment he proposed a suck-up powwow with the Rutgers girls’ basketball team. What kept me up was not the imminent prospect of Imus’ defenestration, but rather the poltergeists that evidently had laid siege to my desktop PC.  The trouble started when I attempted to fire up a brand-new iPod Shuffle, a gift from Summit Bank, where I’d opened a checking account earlier in the day. No sooner had I hard-wired the half-matchbook-sized swag to my PC than everything on an external drive I use for backup vanished. It took me a few minutes to figure out that these two events were unrelated and that my drive had simply crashed. When I tried to restart it, Microsoft Windows helpfully suggested trying again, and in HAL 9000-like fashion further advised me to give up if the unit didn’t work after another try. Which it didn’t.

But the real trouble began around 2 a.m., when I decided to back up all of my data right then and there on CD-ROMs. Even now, half a day later,  I’m still not sure what happened to all of the Rick’s Picks commentaries I’d archived as Word documents. And about 1,800 mpg files, souvenirs from the Napster era, seem to have mutated into a format that neither iPod nor RealPlayer recognizes. And don’t even ask about the iTunes that I’d archived for my 14-year-old son. I hadn’t realized what a comprehensive collection of groovy tracks he’d accumulated – on a weekly allowance of $15 -- until I spotted a few unfamiliar items on a recent credit card statement.

Snowstorm Threatens

Anyway, it’s late afternoon, and I’m cruising on adrenaline at the moment. I have tickets for Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession in Denver tonight, but warnings of a huge snowstorm have added an element of risk to the evening. Concerning the burned-out external hard drive, it sprang miraculously back to life after I tossed it onto the floor. No kidding. I’d left it for dead, but a PC-savvy friend correctly surmised that the disappearing files were not necessarily a symptom of a hardware malfunction, but rather of yet one more Windows-related intrusion.

He also had a theory about why my Dell laptop has spontaneously begun to prompt me for a 26-character wi-fi code every time I boot up. I had made no changes to the computer, but a possibility I’d neglected to consider was that Microsoft, ever vigilant in making certain our PCs are surly, vexatious, and downright maddening, had deposited yet another wicked viral spore on my C: drive in the form of an umpteenth Windows “security patch”. 

We who depend heavily on computers can no more afford to be without our PC-savvy friends than a hypochondriac can be without a doctor in the family.