Every OS Wastes Your Time, From The Desktop To The Lap

The following was written at approximately 1:00 AM, 4/22/07:

One of the things that strikes me, as I lie in bed, staring at a Soviet-era Bulgarian ceiling, unable to sleep, is how much larger the world must have been when the Peace Corps was founded. Then, you had letters, postcards, photos, etc., but they moved at the speed of the mail (which was extremely variable). If you were lucky, you had phone service. Now, if you're connected to the internet, everything you could ever want to see or know (and quite a few things that you didn't) is just a mouse click and a load time away.

In the long run, it will probably turn out that my laptop's harddrive frying (or whatever the hell happened to it) will be a blessing. I can cut the electronic tether, learn independence from my internet/computer addiction (forced intellectual detox, if you will), that sort of thing. It doesn't change the fact that it is somewhat (and I am, of course, understating the situation) irritating to have a piece of technology - that you had assumed to be reliable - turn out to be a waste of packing space. Nor does it particularly mitigate the frustration of having to re-map any and all plans you may have had which were dependent on your shiny new paperweight.

I suppose that that's really what gets to me. I actually had a cohesive plan, for once; I knew how certain things were going to go. Were I a different man, I might suspect the universe of having a bit of a chuckle at my expense. I might even suspect my laptop of maliciously committing suicide. It's possible that I would even go so far as to shake my fists and rage with Shatnerian impotency.

At this point, none of these suspicions/actions have come to pass (though I reserve the right to put them into practice later). I mean, it could always have been worse. The bloody thing could have exploded. Worse still, it could have decided to do this after I left Radomir, in the middle of collecting data for my proposed research paper, before I'd backed any of it up. That would have been, to put it mildly, simply splendid.

What I'm getting at, in a sort of roundabout way, is that all of this can serve as an object lesson into the nature of the Peace Corps (or life itself, I suppose), if you let it. You've prepared for the journey, you've packed your bags, headed off into the wild blue yonder on your grand adventure, only to discover that the situation changed miway through. You discover that your baggage is useless; that you completely failed to anticipate certain eventualities; that the one constant upon which many of your plans were based was not, in fact, constant. You could take away all sorts of profound life lessons from the simple event of a technological malfuntion in a foreign country wherein you don't even speak enough of the language to find a computer store, much less inform the technicians of anything more than "it broke" (if that). Alternately, you could walk away with an altogether simpler sentiment:

...Freaking technology.

Later, flipsiders.