Tech Takes A Holiday
January 20, 2005

Most of us have been making rather merry these last few weeks, enjoying our seasonal festivities of choice. In addition, I had some unplanned holiday time thrust upon me when my trusty Mac waved bye-bye for the last time and went quietly, utterly south, one program at a time.

I am not a techie. I have the lowest comprehension of tech matters of any hominid that still walks erect. If you think of the marvel of chip and circuit technology that lurks inside my PCU as a deep and vasty ocean of miraculous and mysterious possibilities, my entire knowledge of what goes on in that ocean is like one teeny bubble of foam trembling on the crest of a mighty wave.

I run three programs on my Mac: Word, for writing, Internet Explorer for surfing, and email. Word tends to glitch, and I work around it. Explorer occasionally goes offline, and I unplug for five minutes to get it back. This is the extent of my computer repair knowledge. When I started getting scary notices about corrupted startup disks, I even mustered the nerve to run a disk repair program, which is something I’d done before; it finds a problem, you hit the "fix" button, and the day is saved. Even I can do that. But there was no quick fix this time. New windows appeared displaying a bunch of (to me) indecipherable alternative options from which I was expected to choose. Yeah, right, like I would know. What do I look like, Steve Wozniak?

I did what any sensible being would do in my shoes: I aborted the disk repair and shut down. (This is from the Scarlett O’Hara school of household repair: tomorrow is another day.) Only next morning I could no longer access my email. No end runs, no alternative routes, no ifs, ands, or buts. I was locked out.

Not that I minded not getting my usual 27 pieces of spam every single morning. But it was the day before Thanksgiving, I was in the middle of some hellish holiday deadlines, and all of my work is submitted via email. Gone are the days when I could waltz into this office with my work typed on a sheet of actual paper; even submission on a floppy is now considered too Stone Age. Besides, I had an article due on the east coast in two days.

It was time to call in the pros. But my usual computer guru, Kevin, whose kindness of heart and technical skills I’ve imposed upon for years, was unavailable. So I had to outsource; I unplugged my Mac and took it into the shop. We still had Art Boy’s computer on the premises for any last-minute email emergencies, but otherwise I was no longer linked to the global Borg. I was tech-free.

There was a period of withdrawal, of course, about all the stuff I might be missing. What about that agent considering my novel? What about the magazine mulling over my short story? What about all those hundreds of people going to my website clamoring for signed copies of my book? (Okay, that’s never actually happened, but you can’t blame a person for trying a little associative magic.)

But a funny thing happened as my enforced vacation lengthened into days. I started to dig it. I spent an entire day sketching and inking our annual Christmas card. I started mixing batches of cookie dough for the holidays. I puttered around the house doing household things I never get around to doing because I’m always on some screeching deadline or other. My ancient cat, unable figure out why her designated lap was not in its customary place in front of the monitor for seven hours a day, had to find herself another power spot.

It was like losing electricity after the storm of ’82 or the quake of ’89, a sort of special occasion when, unplugged from the global village, we were all unexpectedly free to make up daily life as we went along. At the end of my first tech-free day, Art Boy and I not only had dinner by candlelight, we extended the mood by building a fire for our evening entertainment instead of plotzing in front of the TV for another two or three reruns of Seinfeld (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

I wrote a column the old-fashioned way—in pencil, in longhand, on lined notebook paper, sitting at my desk in front of my dark and undemanding monitor eye. When time came to write a review, I migrated downstairs with my notebook to curl up on the couch in our sunny, south-facing window. Sure the writing took me twice as long, but it was such an illicit thrill to be out of my usual work environment and enjoying the day. And I could always transcribe the work on Art Boy’s computer and send it in.

I wasn’t actually sorry to get my Mac back. It’s the tool of my trade, enabling me to do the work I love. Even though I lost all my email files, folders, and addresses, I found it sort of cleansing. After all, it’s a new year, time to start afresh. Tomorrow is another day.