There's a Big Difference Between Mostly Dead and All Dead

It all began with a death threat…

Mrs. Cap’n Firepants, Give us your computer as hostage for 3-5 business days or your hard drive will die a slow and painful death.  Sincerely,Apple

Upon receiving this demand, I promptly threw it in the pile with my other death threats.  After all, I am a pirate’s wife.  I do not take death threats seriously unless they are repeated a couple of times.  Plus, I don’t deal with terrorists.

Then I got the e-mail.

Mrs. Cap’n Firepants, we are not joking.  Your hard drive is about to kick the can.  Sincerely, Apple.

Okay.  Fine.  I needed to replace my hard drive.  This, of course, necessitated backing it up, which I hadn’t done in over a year.  So, I plugged in my backer upper thing, fired up my Time Machine, and let it do its thing over night.

The next morning, all was good.  Backer upper filled.  Time Machine back from the future.

One of my friends had advised me to keep backer uppering once a day, and only the new things would be added.  Sounded good.

Next morning, error message on my computer.  Time Machine seriously messing with my computer, making me feel like I was traveling at light speed and about to throw up.  Absolutely no data on my backer upper.  Time Machine apparently ate everything in the backer upper and spit it out in a parallel universe.

Not good.

Further research made me conclude that my backer upper needed more space.  This meant I needed a new backer upper.

It was Christmas time.  I was busy setting up my Harry Potter nativity, and consoling my daughter over the inadvertent beheading of her Harry Potter ornament.  I did not have time or money to purchase a new backer upper.  Besides, no new ransom notes had arrived.  So things were probably not that serious.

I think you know where this is going.

I will skip the death scene, which occurred a couple of days after Christmas. Suffice it to say, that it’s good that I take anti-depressants and that I hadn’t, at that point, seen Les Miserables yet.

I got a new hard drive.  For free.  I suspect that the kidnappers, upon meeting me in person, rightly concluded that I was not a person with whom they should trifle about ransom.  I doubt the hysterics had anything to do with it.

But a new hard drive could never replace the old one, the one that knew all of my secrets and -

I decided that I needed a Miracle Max.

It turned out that, like The Princess Bride’s Man in Black,  my hard drive was only mostly dead, and Miracle Max was able to resurrect it, for a small fee equivalent to the cost of a year at Harvard.

Heartened by this turn events I brought the new body of my old hard drive home, and plugged it into the old body of my new hard drive so they could become one.

And now, it seems, that I apparently pimped my computer to a rabbit.  Instead of years of photographs, or the complete absence of photographs, my pictures exponentially reproduced, so that I now have 4 times as many photos as before the hard drive died.  And, ironically, I once again have too much data to fit on my backer upper.

I know that, if you have suffered the death of a hard drive, you have no sympathy for me, at this point.  I mean, why should I complain that I now have 100,000 pictures of Wonderbutt hogging space on my hard drive when, a week ago, I was sobbing because I had none?

That’s okay.

When my Toyota falls apart because I procrastinated responding to their ransom note (which they cleverly disguised as a “recall notice”), then you will regret your hard heart regarding my hard drive.  I only hope you can cope with the guilt.

P.S. This one is for you, Guap:

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