Serenity now!

I'm sitting at home, typing on a laptop computer I don't own, and for a fraction of a second, I am at peace.

I have had a lackluster week at the office, attempting to churn out something that passes for journalism. Or as I like to call it these days, hyper-local content. Somehow community journalism doesn't sound so impressive when your medium is the internet, I'm learning from the web geniuses out there. You need a fancy name for your paperless words, evidently.

Ooooooooh, hyper local. Sounds impressive! (/sarcasm)

My lackluster week just got a lot worse. I made a cameo at the office this evening and learned that committing a cardinal computer sin is going to make my life a living hell for the next week or two. The sin: I turned my computer off on Wednesday.

Normally I leave ye olde computer on, opting for a restart every few days. In need of a fresh start at the end of the day Wednesday, I turned the old girl off instead of restarting her. Big mistake.

Now I can't get it to fire up, and I smell another dead hard drive in the office. I say another because I went through a similar crisis last winter. Does it sound like I'm cursed? It gets better.

The first time I fried the office hard drive, it was less than 48 hours after my home computer crashed and burned. Suffice it to say I'm not touching the rehabbed home computer for a few days if I can help it. Thank Jehovah for the office laptop.

As I fumbled, mightily, to access my e-mail and create files on another office computer earlier tonight, it dawned upon me that yes, without a computer, my life is devoid of meaning. We can't produce newspapers without computers, and as soon as there's a glitch in the system, all hell breaks loose. And without a computer, how am I going to keep abreast of the pointless activities of so many via Facebook and Twitter?

I'm not the first genius to come to this realization, but the fact we're so tied to these machines makes me wonder how anything got done without them 30 years ago.

Computers have made life faster and easier in many ways, but they've brought us a lot more work because of that, and they've handicapped us to the point of no return when the day comes that they stage their rebellion and collectively blow up in our faces. Every last one of them will go "poof" and anarchy will reign!

Facing such a future, perhaps I should have pulled a Cosmo Kramer and beat the daylights out of every last computer in that office. But no, I opted for serenity now.

I'll save the Insanity for later.