Responsibility and Personal Growth

In March, I was at my favorite coffee shop when my computer crashed.

Now, last winter was not exactly my best season. Winters are hard in Pittsburgh, I was broke, I was stressed, and I took this fairly common technology hick-up as a very personal affront from the universe.

My laptop died, and I started crying. In the coffee shop. In front of people.

Because, I had work to do and needed a computer to do it. We are a new company, it's not like we have extra laptops to use if one crashes - we all rely on our personal laptops. I didn't have extra money to spend on computer repairs. And, perhaps the most inexcusable thing of all is that I had nothing backed up - meaning 4 years of my digital life may have just disappeared.

Most of my Thread work was backed up in Google docs and email. But my personal stuff; photos, and music, and the journal I keep to save all of the stories I don't want to share publicly - gone.

Jenna was with me, and told me to pack up my stuff, took me to lunch, then dropped me off at the Apple store. Where, it was determined that my hard drive was ok, the repair would be a minimal charge, and I would have a working computer again in 24 hours. I bought an external hard drive on the spot, and sat there for 2 hours while they backed up everything.

Sometimes we do live and learn.

So yesterday at 4:30 pm, when my laptop crashed on me 14 hours before I was going to be on a flight to San Francisco for a week, I wasn't even phased.

I made an appointment at the genius bar and planned out a worst-case-contigency-plan, which involved buying an ipad in case they couldn't fix the problem that night so that I could get work done from San Francisco. Not only was I now a responsible adult with her laptop backed up, I was a responsible adult with an emergency fund. And I know, I know, emergency funds shouldn't really be spent on ipads, but if that's the solution that was necessary, I was ready for it.

I didn't have to buy an ipad. They rushed the fix so I had a working machine again in 2 hours. I've found the Apple Geniuses to be incredibly accommodating people, and wish that more customer-service interactions involved them.

6 months and everything about my response to the same situation had changed.

And obviously, this whole story is nothing but a first world problem. But I also feel it's symbolic of my response to my life in the past 6 months, which is to say that the stuff causing me to burst into tears last March are such fixable and manageable problems now. That's nice to know. Even if it also means there are a whole host of new seemingly personal affronts from the universe to deal with.