Warning! Warning! Danger, Will Robinson!

Whether you understand the title tells alot about your age, as it comes from a 1960's sci fi show featuring a campy tin-can robot who alerts the boy Will Robinson to impending disaster by arm-waving (well, dryer vent hose waving, actually) and the verbal alert.  Of course, if you're a hacker, you'll also know what it means.

Yesterday the inevitable happened.  With information already in hand, I have delayed and delayed and delayed getting a new computer, even as my old lap top has gotten slower and slower and s. . .l. . . o. . . w. . . e. . . r. . .

The old gal made my decision for me.  With much alarm-bell beeping (look up "motherboard alarm codes" online if you want to know what those ominous beeps actually mean), my laptop was practically waving its arms at me -- STOP RIGHT NOW!


Of course I didn't listen.  I just kept rebooting, hoping against hope that something magical would happen within the mysterious (to me) innards of my lifeline to the outside world.  Alas, it was not to be so.
There won't be a funeral as such, but it's safe to say that the old Dell has gone the way of such creations, far too soon to suit me, but well past her MLS (median life span).  From the way those more conversant in the ways of computers tell it, I'm guessing she was about 60 in computer years (having bought her in 2005).  I should be grateful she lasted so long.  And I am, sort of.


I appreciate the incredible technological advances, the leaps forward.  But I resent, more than a little, planned obsolescence.


But even as I say that, I have to smile.  After all, aren’t we human beings planned for obsolescence from the very beginning?  Everything and everyone has a shelf life.  Maybe what I don’t like is that my own is winding down.


One of the most grace-filled things I have ever heard came from a professor at Johns-Hopkins on NPR a while back (sorry can’t remember his name and am too lazy to search out the link).  Speaking about the burden of perpetual memory, in light of things like FB pages and e-mail maintenance accounts for the dead, he reminded his listeners, me among them, that when we die, it’s out duty to exit gracefully from the stage and allow the living their turn, rather than to seek some false version of immortality by seeking to require future generations to maintain our web presence into perpetuity.


I like very much the idea of exiting from the stage gracefully.  It’s freeing, really, to allow myself to allow others to simply let me, all of me, go. 


Dylan Thomas was wrong, I think.  It is not rage that we should carry into our dark nights.  It’s gratitude.  Gratitude for the time.  Gratitude even that the time has passed.


And thus do I say a grateful good-bye to my faithful computer, even as I know that some day, those near and dear will say such farewells to me.