Sure, we love our machines, we say, when they work. But you can't drop them, they don't survive even minor earthquakes without losing all of your data, and, unforgettably, they're very touchy about being switched off while they're busy.
So imagine my horror to find that the cleaning lady had a little accident; somehow, the iron "blew up". Not quite detonated, but did that whole sparks-and-terrifying-flash-of-lightning thing that only AC equipment can really do properly. Naturally, the folks who live with me here didn't believe her - and promptly plugged it into another socket just a few hours later to see for themselves the wonder that is electricity gone awry.
24 hours later, and we're back online - and magically, this time, don't appear to have lost anything at all. An hour of drive fscking (that is, for those who might not know and despite my entirely predictable demeanour at the time, not a typo), and the system making four loud, foreboding beeping noises every time it hit a trashed sector of the disk... but hey - at least it's alive, right?
Still, it reminds me, as tragedy so often does, that not so much has changed in the last ten years. Sure, that machine has gone from being the size of a house to its equivalent being embedded in everything from hi-fi equipment and wristwatches, but one thing seems to remain true: they're all bloody fragile. The watch takes a beating - and gets millions poured into development to let it do so - but you're not going to do a whole hell of a lot with it. Hard drives, our saviour, are our bane - little spinning disks, a point on the surface of it will come full circle in anywhere from 60 to 166 or more times per second; faster than it takes your TV to touch the pixels on the screen, faster than the human eye can see.
But drop it, and watch all 166 rotations per second lose everything you ever wanted to keep; all your e-mail, your photos of silly people doing strange things, years of accumulated crap, and knowledge, and detritus that, if it were physical, you'd have sorted into the attic, the bin, the local charity, and that space under the bed.
This time, I was lucky; last time, the hard drive just fried. This particular Sun seems to have a strange aversion to power cuts - this is the second major power fault in two years, and each time, it's caused absolute hell on the drives. This time, I'm feeling pretty lucky. And it just goes to show you - it's true, the techies are all, the whole lot of them, the worst at backing up their own things. I don't know how many times I've wanted to hang someone for saying "Didn't you create a backup"?
No. That's something I do at work. At home, apparently, I ride the lightning and learn to love the bomb.
