Have you tried turning it off and turning it back on?

So what happened was, on the last Friday of February, my computer froze. Have you tried turning it off and turning it back on? Yes. Turning it off worked. Turning it back on did not.

The iMac G5 I’ve been using since 2005 refused to start, making us a house without a computer. Called around the next day and found a local independent shop that assured me they’d have it up and running “some time next week.” Phew.

That was a huge relief, because that trusty vintage machine had been the last computer standing in our house. (My old back-up Chromebook turned into a doorstop a few years ago when they stopped supporting the software for that model.) More importantly, I had a lot of work on that computer — months of writing and editing in files that may or may not also be saved to “the Cloud” somewhere. The guy from the shop assured me that all of that could be recovered. Soon. As soon as the part arrived, in just a few days.

For the first two weeks, the local shops blamed UPS, which wasn’t a lie. They tracked my shipment from Iowa, to West Chester just a few miles away, then to ,.. Illinois? … and then back to the seller. This happened twice because apparently UPS refuses to deliver to the near-abandoned, possibly haunted, Exton Mall. Oh, and also the local computer sh0p’s “Mac Guy” only works Wednesdays and weekends, so the torturous stringing along that ensued took on this “check back with us in a couple of days” quality that just kept extending those couple of days to the next couple of days, and then the next.

When they gave it a third try — via Federal Express this time — and tracked my new (to me) hard drive to FedEx’s nearby center, I offered to drive there myself to pick it up, but no worries, it’s fine, they had a hard confirmation of delivery by 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, which by that point was Tuesday, the third of March.

When I called Wednesday, I was told that FedEx had returned the hard drive to the seller back in Iowa. Oh, and also their Mac Guy was quitting, probably, or at least had stopped showing up. So tomorrow I can go back to the haunted mall to pick up my still-dead computer and they’ll give me my money back, but not my time.

I’ve spent much of that time collecting the dusty laptops of family and friends. Lots of people, it turns out, still have their old laptop, unused since they got their new one, but kept as a back-up just in case. And most of those, it turns out, are like my old Chromebook — back-ups that no longer work.

But this one does. And so here I am, back online. I thank you for your patience.

Now I’ve got to figure out how many of my old files can be recovered from various cloud servers and how many of them are just gone unless and until I can find some way to get that old vintage iMac running again. (A tech-literate friend thinks he can pull a Miracle Max — “it’s only mostly dead” — and retrieve some of that lost writing and editing for me.)

Over the past month I’ve filled most of a spiral-bound notebook with what would have been posts here. Now that I’m back online, I’ll see how much of my handwriting I can decipher and get started on catching up. The “starred/read later” counter in my RSS reader is up over 800 because there’s so much I’ve read that I want to share here.

I’m still getting used to this new device and still figuring out how to get it to do all the things my old no-longer-trusty G5 did for me, but now, at last, I’m back on my feet here.

Thank you to everyone who reached out to help me with this situation. And thank you all again for your patience.