It is gone. After almost six years of serving me well, the machine did not detect the hard drive. On Friday, I was testing students to prepare them for their oral examination. When I came back to my office, my laptop had surrendered.
It had a blinking folder icon in the middle of the screen and a question mark on it. That meant that there was something wrong with the hard drive. I tried everything and I went to one of the service centres after work. The data in it may be gone if no one can retrieve it.
This laptop, old and slightly dented, means everything to me. I bought it with one of my best friends when I had mustered up enough courage to splurge on a MacBook Air. It was almost $2000, which was what I made a month starting out as a writer for a content aggregator. I had saved up religiously and the thought of spending so much money was terrifying for me. I was a poor writer and I thought that I would be poor forever. I honestly took a leap of faith buying this laptop because it would help me do my work faster.
It did.
It has served me well no matter what kind of job I’ve had — from writing, editing, doing social media, the works. I’ve done some rudimentary video editing on it and photoshopping on it as well. I’ve also watched Netflix on it and used it to make rudimentary drawings of my life. This laptop is my best friend and a portal to the digital world. It has allowed me to keep in touch with all of my friends, some of whom are overseas. This laptop is my life.
In fact, it is more than my life. It is me. It is every thought, hope, and dream that I’ve contained. Although I’ve backed up most of what I need for my writing, I made the mistake of not backing up everything when I could. I now have to try and retrieve all the data with the help of a licensed vendor and it will cost me money.
The good news is that Dragonhearted and the sequel have been backed up. The other stories and work that I have is backed up. I wish I had done more, though. I wish I had the sense to back up everything earlier on.
But as with anything else, my laptop couldn’t be the once efficient beauty that it once was. Before the crash, it was definitely a little slower because of how much I’d installed in it. Its battery life isn’t what it once was. I’m also having problems with it because my MS Word crashes when I do heavy editing. (Sorry Daphne.)
I don’t want to say goodbye to my laptop. It means everything to me. But I had to take it to a recovery centre to retrieve the data and then reinstall the OS on it.
Back up everything. Save it on a cloud server. Even the most reliable of technologies can fail.
RIP MacBook Air. You have served me well.
Image of Macbook from Amazon