The brain trust met. This would be calm eyed Ben, calm eyed Jim, and wild eyed me. We summed up our technology problems succinctly. After we upgraded one computer in our network to the latest Mac OS X version 10.4.8, none of the other computers could communicate across the network. The disconnects left us losing our minds and our files. Due consideration was given to your input which could best be described as a greek chorus chanting in unison, “You need to upgrade all the computers”. It was not too late to listen to the greek chorus. I still had my hair. A few brain cells remained alive and swirling in my cranium.
The IMacs that looked so snazzy five, six, and seven years ago are off line and will soon be on their way to the local computer recycle center where a lone man roams in a behemoth warehouse full of abandoned machines. Our new babies sit in a row, silent and pristine. They are the height of technology fashion. Their screens are the size of my childhood television. And they actually talk to each other.
Not that I would know, because one of my consuming side projects right now is taking all the documents I saved on these various obsolete machines and translating them to a format that can be opened on one of the new machines.
Yes, yes after so many crashes over the year we back up daily, weekly, monthly, sometimes it seems even hourly. We back up all the pertinent files like our mailing list, but stuff like the emails I save, well I though putting them in a file on my desktop was enough. It was not.
Now I need to take all those records from each of these old computers and take each record through a seven step process to upgrade each to a “word document” The file I am working on right now is one of four enormous files on one of the three dinosaur machines. This file alone has 900 email records in it. That’s 6300 clicks with my mouse to save what’s in this file. I haven’t done a head count on the other files, but I am thinking this is going to take awhile. The lone man at the recycle facility may have to wait a little bit longer before he gets our machines.
On the bright side, as the files go by I have to laugh at the funny stuff in these emails. I will see a sentence as I click like ” I will never scrub her toilet again” from one of you working with “All Ego Contracts Null and Void.” When I see one that says, “What was I thinking when I decided to make cupcakes for a living?”, I pause in my clicking and reread the email to recall the whole cupcake debacle that one of you beloveds shared with me. This rereading is why I saved these emails in the first place, though I didn’t expect to be perusing them now because of technology issues. They were supposed to be something I chortled over years from now while writing my twelve volume autobiography.
But life has its own plan and right now this late night mouse clicking is proving to have its benefits. I get to remember so many things I have learned about Essences from you and from asking the Angels for you, I get to remember so many problems figured out in lots of back and forth emails. And I get to remember how many things were funnier once they were shared with one of you! Thank you!