Regaining faith in the machine

My mom had a heart attack a short time before Christmas, and my brothers and sister and I have been taking turns staying with her and helping around the house until she regains her strength. Now is my turn.

I expected to be here for several weeks, so I had to bring my work with me. If my work were just the column, I could have gotten by with my laptop, with its PCMCIA faxcard. It travels very well. It came with a nicely padded case to absorb bumps and thumps, and it fits in the overhead carrier on a plane.

But I need to do some desktop publishing work, too, involving CD-ROM drive and scanner, so I decided to load my entire computer system -- including my beloved old Zeos 486 computer -- into the family car and drive the 700 miles. At the unofficial new 90 mph speed limit, I figured it would take me about nine hours, with smooth Interstate highways beneath me the whole way.

It wasn't 40 years in the wilderness, but the trip was rougher than I planned. It began the morning of last week's big storm. I woke up wide-eyed in St. Paul, imagining it was nearly dawn. It was really 2:30 AM, but I was too wired to go back to sleep.

The first problem was packing. I had to carry a big tower PC, plus monitor, laser printer, and several boxes of add-ons 40 feet across icy sidewalks to the van. I could easily imagine slipping, throwing the 60-pound PC a dozen feet in the air, falling on my back, and having the PC come down on my sternum, cracking me open to die, gurgling, in the subzero temps.

Handy tip: splash a jug of windshield washer on your icy sidewalk. You are granted ten minutes of instant friction before it refreezes. I loaded up hastily, resting the equipment on a blanket, and beat it out of town. It would be hours before the rising sun would reveal the bluest sidewalk in the North Country.

It was the strangest weather I drove into, as if pressure fronts were honoring state lines. Crossing into Hudson, I entered a 275-mile cloud of fog, that lifted in Beloit, on the Illinois state line. Almost immediately it began raining torrentially, lasting through all eight tollbooths. Approaching the Indiana border you could see sunshine.

It was in Ohio that I began to worry about the hardware behind me. If you have ever read about a hard disk crash, you know the standard analogy is that the disk head coming into contact with a mote of dust on your spinning disk is like a loaded Boeing 757 landing without wheels.

Well, that's if the machine is turned on. But I was still awfully anxious about the vibrations of the car disconnecting something. Every bump in the road had the ability to do that.

The freeways, tollways and turnpikes weren't bad. But I got off the turnpike too soon in Toledo, and found myself driving about 40 miles through city streets that had suffered through a real winter pounding: train tracks, sewer lids, pavement dividers and potholes. The potholes were the worst, leached out of the concrete and asphalt by freezes, thaws, saltings and refrefreezes.

Each time a tire went over one, I thought of the delicate latticework of wires, cables, leads and connections that make up a computer, a printer, and a monitor -- a thousand contact points which, if only one were sundered, would cripple the entire system. And now I was driving over a thousand potholes. And where there no potholes there were the next worst thing, pothole patches.

What were the chances that the machine would boot up when I finally dragged it into my mother's house? What would become of me, computerless in a strange land, with deadlines staring me humorlessly in the eye?

It occurred to me, as I entered my hometown, and drove by the parochial school where I attended first and second grade, that there was as yet no patron saint assigned to hard disk crashes, and that a proactive church, what with all the suffering in the world relative to data loss, would have designated one by now.

If there had been one, I would have been praying to him/her.

Anyway, I arrived home after 15 hours of ice, fog, rain and potholes. I kissed my mom, who looked pretty good for having had a heart attack and been sick for a month, and start setting up.

The system booted up without a problem. I resumed breathing.

It was a reminder to me to have more faith. What about all those PCs you see at your mechanic's, all grimy with motor oil and engine dirt? How about the computers they put on space shuttles, that take the g-forces and keep on blinking? You can buy a PC and have it shipped to you by UPS, for Pete's sake. People -- I mean, computers -- are pretty doggone rugged.

So I powered down again and sat with my mom. I held her hand and we watched TV until we got sleepy. Things were going to be all right.

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