September 6^th, 2005

So I'm back home from another business trip on which occurred a computer hardware failure that had an interesting effect on me.

Last week, on Wednesday, my regular laptop computer died. This left me on the road without a computer in the evenings, and I found myself surprisingly twitchy! Without email and without my favourite editor to write these rants, I began to exhibit the following strange behaviour:

• I bought a novel and actually read it
• I bought a pad of paper and pens, and started writing the old fashioned way :-)

And, aside from my finger muscles being a little bit tired (don't use certain ones much anymore, since I don't write that much with a pen anymore), I found that life more or less carried on as usual. Oh, sure, I'm going to regret my cell phone bill—East Coast to West Coast so I could talk to my wife, whom I always miss almost painfully much—but without my email, everything I wanted to say to her just cost a little bit more money. Hmm ...

And on the day I returned, I had a long layover in an airport, so I sat at a bar with a football game on TV in front of me, a beer at my side, and a pad of yellow note paper under the pen in my hand. Except for the nice clean air, instead of the smoky haze, and the fact that it was football and not hockey, I could have been back at university. That's how I wrote a lot of my papers: Beer and hockey in a smoky room in the pub. And then, home to type it up. I liked the nostalgia of it, though the beer was American (so a bit weak and watery) and cost a lot more than the $1.75/pint that it did in the old university pub.

But the other thing that surprised me greatly was how much fun reading novels is. I know that sounds stupid, but I realise that although I have hundreds of books sitting on shelves in my living room, I hardly ever actually read any of them any more! Silly, if you ask me ... but hardly surprising when you consider how computers have invaded that space.

So, although it complicated my working life last week, and although it sent me into minor paroxysms¹ of computer withdrawal, losing the ability to use a computer for four days has actually taught me a lesson:

I gain a lot that I want to keep when I use computers, but I also lose a lot by using them.

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¹ Is there such a thing as a "minor paroxysm"? It's sort of like "mild cancer" or "quiet thermonuclear blast". Or, as the Scottish comedian Billy Connolly once said, you never hear the words, "'Fuck off,' he hinted."

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