The Worst Possible Thing; Worse Than Being Forced To Kill Seven Puppies And Finding You Only Have Six Bullets

I woke up 40 minutes ago, bleary-eyed, headphones still on, having fallen asleep watching Flight of the Conchords for the millionth time because if I'm not watching anything I just lie there in bed visualizing my manifold failures and then I can't sleep.

The method behind what I generously call my life is not the point. The point is that on the screen was not Flight of the Conchords. On the screen was MS-DOS. I stared uncomprehendingly, having been awake for maybe three seconds at this point.

DOS? I thought. What?
Oh. It's the boot sequence.
Why is it the boot sequence?
I don't know. What does it say?
"The boot devices have changed."
Oh. It lists one device. The other two hard disks and the DVD-ROM are gone.
I see.
I wonder what the least unpleasant way to kill myself is.
Normally I would ask Wikipedia.
Maybe the dictionary will know.

No, I thought gravely. No, it probably won't.

Then I decided to actually investigate the problem, with what was really an astonishing level of calm and collectedness. It turned out to be minor.

One of the extremely unwise stopgap solutions I've improvised over the past year of jury-rigging my machine like some sprawling, convoluted heap of inextricable overheating devices and twisted cables had loosened. In this case, the cable was the wall plug for a hard disk which is running on external power but plugged into the mainboard (don't ask; stopgap terrible you idiot I don't have any money etc.). So the system rightfully freaked out. Simple fix. No problem. And now I am mercifully sitting in front of 40 tabs of Flock.

A year ago I had a 100-gig hard drive with basically everything important on it suffer a mechanical failure and die on me. I tried every single ridiculous solution you'll read about to recover stuff from it, up to and including the use of the freezer and smacking the thing sharply, as though to reprimand it. I've since been perpetually afraid that it will happen again before I can afford to properly outfit this thing with a backup drive and some non-retarded replacements for my various idiocies.

So an incident such as this is among my worst nightmares; to wake up and be greeted with the infuriating boot sequence, in front of which I've spent dozens of hours trying to fix things over the years, as it essentially says ALL YOUR SHIT IS BROKE AND I WON'T TELL YOU WHY HA HA HA.

And of course it's always entirely my fault, because instead of reading a book to fall asleep, I pretty much recreate early man's firestarting methods inside my computer, where appallingly stacked and unventilated devices share their increasing heat as uncleared mounds of dust gather around them. My computer's human counterpart would be Sean Penn in 21 Grams, a wheezing wreck with a shoddy secondhand heart that is in love with Naomi Watts (although that last part is actually just me and not the computer).

Just bear with me a little longer, you gasping homebuilt monstrosity. Some day I will whisk you away to the Big City, and we will both live in air-conditioned comfort, and when your hard drives finally die of old age many years from now I will frame them in appreciation on top of a sepia-toned photograph of a big, silly '50s computer. I will give you a name and then autograph it with that name and a postcript that says "Thanks For the Memories," and I will put the frame above my mantle and smile.