Ordeals

At Costco, waiting on line to return a defective backup drive.

The whole point of a backup drive is to protect you if your computer disk drive fails, right? So what's the use of a backup drive whose mean time to failure is less than a year! (As found on the Internet, the repository of all human knowledge.)

Recently my backup drive suddenly became unreadable. I forged ahead, managed to reformat it even though I lost all my historical backups. I was going to replace it, but I have a few other things on my mind these days.

Yesterday it started making the 'click of doom' and disappeared from the desktop. It gave up the ghost and went straight to heaven the place where devices turned doorstops and fish tanks go. I stayed up past midnight making CD backups of all my personal files. My poems, my novels, my journals, my photos. Today I went to Costco near the airport. F-16s roared overhead like malevolent creatures from the Book of Revelation. A commercial jetliner glided toward its runway, so close to the treetops that its belly was probably painted green with chlorophyll.

The one nice thing about Costco is that if you're not happy they give you cash back, no questions. So I came home with a replacement drive. Several hours later it's still grinding away at its job of encrypting everything on my Mac. On the way home there was an I-5 traffic jam of inexplicable origin and heroic proportions, featuring giant concrete mixers and a huddle of enormous trucks. The 5-minute trip across the Fremont Bridge took half an hour. The most fun I had today is the describing of it.

Tomorrow I will get on the freeway again and toodle or creep, depending, to Salmon Creek where another defective part will be examined. I hope it's in better shape than my backup drive was. I don't think I can turn it in for a newer model because, alas, I didn't get it at Costco.