Zen and the Art of iBook Repair

It's tough, I know.

You use it every day. You get to know it. And as you get to know it, you want to have more of it to know, so you create a personality for it. Embed an aspect of your personality IN it...a particular picture on your desktop. Custom icons. You change the font, change the startup screen, change the sounds. You give your hard drive a name, one that makes you laugh, or think, or remember. Maybe you even put stickers on the case, or tattoo it with a Sharpie. You make it yours, and as ridiculous as it sounds, as unbelievably TACKY as it sounds, you begin to love it. And in its own way, in its reliability and its consistency, in that neat desktop and that cleverly-named hard drive with its cool little icon, it loves you back. Love is in the little things.

And then one day, it doesn't love you. You press the button, and you don't get that sound, that sound you can recognize instantly and that thrills you just a little bit, every time. Or you get that sound, but you don't get that familiar flash of the LCD screen coming to life. You don't get that smiley face, or if you're up-to-date and with-it, that oh-so-modern discreet grey fruit silhouette. Just black. Or, the screen comes to life, but it just flashes a question mark, an innocent little symbol that has suddenly come to represent everything that's wrong with your life: this thing that you love is asking you a question, and you don't know the answer. And since you don't know the answer, it just keeps asking, and it asks until it fades, and eventually, dies, confused and unfulfilled to the end.

Or there are other things. Loud, harsh clicking emanating from a smooth case which only hummed and beeped before: clearly, this thing you love is angry with you. Or a screen that abruptly begins to aspire to modern art, letting its colors ebb and flow and coalesce and break apart again, before fading into darkness. An unending field of squares, alternating black and white. Hypnotic flashes of multi-colored lines. Or just darkness that seems to grow darker the more you stare, the deeper your spirits descend.

Maybe, if things have gotten REALLY bad, you even begin to SMELL something. You've used this thing for years, but you never knew it could SMELL. And it's not a good smell, not at all: it's faint but sharp, and you wrinkle your nose and wince and know, deep in your heart, that this is a bad, bad thing. This thing you love has begun an assault on your senses.

Maybe you even get smoke.

Ladies and gentlemen, your computer is toast.

So you bring it in, cradling it in your hands, your fear and pain and loss all over your face, and you set it down, and you ask the questions:

What happened?

What did I do?

You want to know Why. And that's understandable. Your friend, your faithful companion, in whom you have invested so much effort and time (and more than a little dough), in whom you have poured some amount of your Self, has just gone tits-up and crashed and burned. It sucks. I know. We all know. And, more often than not, we've got the answer to your questions:

Your logic board, an incredibly complex maze of circuits and chips, blew a tiny but crucial diode somewhere and rendered itself impotent. Your hard drive, at heart a tiny silver disk that for the last two years has spun unerringly several thousand times a minute, rain or shine, through good times and through bad, has run smack into a collection of pesky laws of physics which state that, in a nutshell, while perpetual motion is pretty swell in theory, it tends to be kind of a bitch to put into practice. Your LCD screen, which until last night was connected to the brain of your machine through some a couple of wires slightly larger in diameter than human hairs, is connected no longer, and the couple million transistors in the liquid crystal display, relishing in their newfound freedom, have decided to let their collective hair down and act in ways their creator never intended, or just not act at all. There's reasons behind it all, you know?

But you don't want to know, not really. Your real question, Why, still hasn't been answered, because the answer you want is that God, whatever God you believe in, hates you and has taken it upon Himself to ruin your day. You want to hear it's because you cheated on your taxes. Because you were looking at porn. Because the salesperson didn't like you and decided to give you the dreaded Lemon. Because you didn't drop the extra couple hundred to get the Superdrive instead of the Combo drive...everyone knows the ones with the Superdrive don't break.

I don't know what else to tell you. This thing you love, it doesn't love you. It's just a machine. It's not not working because you pissed it off, it's not working because it broke, just like everything breaks, just like, someday, YOU'RE going to break. And yes, that Powerbook 180 that you used for ten years and worked like a charm until it melted, that faithful little grey brick, it lasted longer than this thing YOU JUST BOUGHT LAST YEAR. LAST YEAR, FOR PETE'S SAKE! Of course, that little grey brick weighed fifteen pounds and had the computational horsepower of a clock radio; your Palm Pilot was laughing at it behind its back. You don't slim a supercomputer so advanced that ten years ago they would have thought it was from space down to the size of a couple magazines without taking it in the chin in regards to durability and longevity. This one's not gonna last you to the next decade, but it'll analyze the human genome and hold enough CDs to fill the trunk of your car. And at the rate they're going, by the next decade, the computers will be about the dimensions and weight of a piece of wax paper, and they'll be able to run the fucking Space Shuttle.

Okay, your computer broke. Want it fixed?