Originally published on March 21, 2017
This week’s article
is not the one I originally planned to publish. I had several ideas and
completed articles sitting on my laptop, all ready to go. Then my laptop
decided not to turn on. It’s happened before, and nothing’s happened to my
files so there’s no worry there. It’s just taking longer than usual to decide
to turn back on and it might take a while to get it fixed. In the meantime, all
my ongoing documents, including a few weeks’ worth of articles, have been
rendered unreachable. Which means I need to improvise an article for this week,
and the topic at hand is reliance on technology. I’ve already written about
going a day without my phone, but this absence of technology feels different,
and not in a good way.
I would still rank
my phone as higher in my list of “safety” electronics. I’d rather not have my
laptop than not have my phone. For me, my laptop symbolizes productivity, and
my phone symbolizes pleasure. Very few productive things get done on my phone.
Rarely do I send emails, do homework, or write things on my phone. It is
supposed to be fast access to everything in the world around me and has all the
little things I need in a day, from social media to email, to my planner app,
calendar, and to-do list. I would truly be lost without my phone.
My laptop, on the
other hand, since starting college has become the source of all my
productivity. This semester I have been writing and engaging in social media so
much more than earlier, but even still, a college student is not without a fair
share of papers, even if they are simple reflections or Odyssey articles. As a commuter, my down time consists of me
sitting on a couch on the second floor of the music building, working on
something. Always writing, always busy, always trying to get ahead. I have
forgotten my laptop before (though, surprisingly, on those days I did remember
my charge cord) but it hasn’t really impacted me as much as it is now because
then I just knew I left it at home. Everything was fine, I would just have to
make do with what I have. Now, thinking about all my files trapped behind a
wall of black, I feel strange. I have all this work done, but I can’t access
it. I need to start over fresh. I’m currently working on a computer at work,
using my school profile and changing the default settings in Word and importing
my Chrome settings so it feels more comfortable. But the keys feel unfamiliar,
the monitor is too big, and despite my How
to Train Your Dragon background on Chrome, the documents folder is still
empty.
I’ve done a lot of
thinking in the past 24 hours. My mood is flipping between forgetting that I
have this problem to how much I hate technology to what kind of laptop I should
buy next because obviously there’s something wrong with mine. You never know
what you’re missing until it’s gone, and right now I’m missing easy access to
my files. It’s a fixable problem, but one I can’t do anything about right now.
Hopefully by the time this publishes it’ll be fixed.
Hug your computer today. It needs as much love as your
phone, or one day it won’t be there for you.
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