Preparing for the Day

So I'm using my Mac and there's this flash on the screen — a blink or something. I look up, and the menubar, normally white across the top of the screen, is only halfway there. Instead of the white with black letters, it's black and blue and very difficult to read.

Those non-Macintosh users of you should know that on a Mac, the menubar is at the top of the screen, not the top of each window. There's only one menubar, since there's only one screen. So when the menubar goes all funky on a Mac user, it's kind of like taking a lollipop away from a kid. In my case, I was still holding the lollipop, but it had changed colors for no obvious reason and was generally freaking me out.

So I'm sitting there freaked out and all by the menubar pyrotechnics, and then the dock goes poof. I guess it didn't literally go poof, since I don't think it made a sound, but it might as well have. I was sitting there kind of mesmerized by the menubar and the dock just plain went away, making me gasp out loud.

Those non-Mac users of you should know that on a Macintosh, the doc is a little palette of sorts that sits at the bottom (or side) of the screen and hold icons of your applications and other things. It's kind of like a dashboard on the machine. And as I sat there, it suddenly disappeared — not something docks do. And when it was gone, the icons it held had fallen to the bottom of my screen, literally. The icons were all lying in a heap on top of one another in the lower left hand corner.

And it all went downhill from there.

I'll spare you the details, but let's just say that were I not a zealous backer-upper of my data, I'd be in tears right now. From the point of dock-poof on, things got worse and worse, eventually leaving me no alternative but to erase my hard disk and reinstall the operating system from scratch. And although I'm sparing you the details, I must tell you that this erase and install exercise was neither straightforward nor pleasant, nor was it quick. In all it's taken almost a week to straighten things out.

Now I can say, with all of that behind me...

I can say...

I can say that I sure am happy I bought that external hard drive to keep my data backups.

What are you doing to prepare for the day?

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