Safe Mode

“Like Peter Pan or Superman…you will come to save me.” – Aimee Mann

The first time the Geek Squad came to my house was in 2005 after my hard drive had been riddled with viruses, (hey, how was I to know that “Naked Tobey Maguire dot com” was an unsafe site?) After fumbling around for four hours, the guy working on my computer stopped making eye contact with me and at about the sixth hour said, “Hey, you sure do Google yourself a lot.” I felt exposed and ashamed and a little defensive and so I answered, “Yeah, well, ya know, that’s what Google is there for.” Then I felt even more exposed and ashamed, so I hid in the kitchen drinking Dr. Pepper until he left. “Back it up, Sista” were his parting words. (Actually, he’d said, “Make sure to get an external hard drive and back up your stuff”, but we hear what we want to hear).

Cut to five years later and guess which “sista” didn’t “back it up”? To be fair to myself, I did attempt to drag my “important documents” folder over to an external hard drive, but later learned I’d only succeeded in creating a “shortcut” to the C-drive. (And here I always thought shortcuts were a good thing). Five years of pictures and letters and sad songs and London music mixes were on that thing in bits and pieces of RAM, slowly losing memory like a brain whose synapses was short-circuiting. “You can still save it,” my boyfriend told me. “Put it in safe mode and then back up your folders before the drive collapses.” So dramatic, this whole computer thing. All this talk of “collapsing” and “memory”, I felt like I was in an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.

I don’t know what mode my hard drive was in, but it was far from safe. Appropriately on Valentine’s Day, it stopped booting completely and after my boyfriend patiently carried the entire thing to Best Buy, I once again came face to face with the Geek (or as I call them “Judgment”) Squad, who told me there was little they could do. I, of course, burst into tears and cried for five minutes near the “Guitar Hero” display and finally went home with a new computer, but very little drive.

And then the weirdness began. The “Squad” had done a full back-up onto CDs in 2005, so I was still able to salvage some of my computer past. But because my boyfriend wanted to transfer the files for me (I assume to avoid user “error”) I had to watch him upload my entire dating history, once again in fragments of memory. “So where do you want this ‘ 2003 Hot Sexy Mix from Matt’ thing? Your iTunes?” “Sure, iTunes is fine.” “Okay, how bout’ these pictures from your trip to San Francisco with Jordan?” “Those can just go into my 2005 pictures folder.” I wanted to say, “Just put it all in a file and name it ‘Over and done with’” but I didn’t. Instead I said, “Just…put it on there and I’ll organize it later, if I can find a good therapist.”

As the “Crazy night with Brian, 2002” video was uploading, I poured myself a glass of wine and gave silent gratitude that I had such a nice boyfriend. And at least in that moment, I was in safe-mode.

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