Doomed to Repeat It

     Remember this post about sweet computer death? It happened again. It didn't take on the exact same form, but death became it nonetheless. I suppose I should applaud the computer for taking on a new and interesting way for it to kill itself. It was most likely a virus, contracted from irresponsible downloading. A blue screen I had never seen before popped up and basically gave me the middle finger. I attempted a few restarts. I was confident that most of my files had been backed up, so I attempted a respawn. Another middle finger. I think the virus the computer contracted gave the computer pneumonia, and it has infected every part of its hard drive.
      Another cruel joke of the respawn failure was the message that came up to inform me of the failure. It instructed me to visit a website to investigate further. Thanks, ass. It reminds me of when my neighbors would come over to call the phone company to report their phone problems. The company always asked if they were calling from their own phone. My neighbor would respond with "no, if I could use my phone, I wouldn't be calling to report it broken." I feel the same way about offering web help for a computer problem. Of course, clearly, I'm on a computer right now, so I could have maybe checked out that page they referred me to. But that's not the point. If my car broke down and I called a mechanic and he told me to drive down there, I'd have the same reaction. Sure, maybe I could drive someone else's car to get to the mechanic, but it doesn't help the problem.
     With this newest sweet computer death, I've starting thinking about a complete computer overhaul. I actually own three computers. That sounds like a lot. It is, but all of them were built before 2008 and have different uses. One of them only has one program on it and doesn't connect to the internet. It's basically a word processor. Another one is basically just a digital storage box and it can't be used for long stretches at a time. It still has a 3.5" floppy drive. The newest one is the one that just died. If it can be resurrected at a reasonable cost, I'd be happy to have it back, but I will not turn it into a lemon where I pour more into repairs than a) it's worth and b) the cost of a new/used computer.
     A friend of mine recently told me Mercury was in retrograde. She said it like I knew what the fuck she was talking about and would understand all of its implications. I didn't. But then I looked it up and it means that the universe has broken its mirror while walking under a ladder with a black cat crossing its path and we should just all stay inside and not touch anything because everything will go wrong. Touche universe. Touche Mercury. You win this round.
     As with the previous sweet computer death post (which I do think happened last time Mercury was in retrograde), I'm choosing to not completely lose my shit. It's just files; it's just plastic, metal, and glass; it's digital spring cleaning. Oh, but the one thing I will lose my shit about is if I tell anyone my computer died and they tilt their head at me and say "you should have gotten a mac." You know, maybe I should have.  But that kind of unsolicited time-travel-requiring advice is worthless and makes me hate you. So don't say it.