A Departure in the Family

A member of the family departed yesterday - not of my own family but of our office family.

I had been present at the moment of death, in the company of an expert named Susan. When it was over, I looked around and realized that life had not paused, not even for a moment, at The Apple Store.

After years of faithful service, the heart of my iMac G5, the logic board, gave up the ghost, and as it was only marginally more expensive to buy a newer model, with sadness, I bought one and drove home with the new one in a box on the back seat and the old one, screen up, in the trunk, the remains covered with a blanket.

I really liked that computer...big screen with all the hardware located behind the screen so there was lots of space on the desk for my horizontal filing, and every morning when I walked into the office, I found just looking at that machine gave me pleasure. And then there was the work we did together - managing the web-site, improving product images before uploading them, thousands of emails in and out, screeds by the dozen, telephone calls via Skype, all the great desktop widgets keeping track of the weather in various places, the number of days before the next trip to Scotland, the ups and downs of the market...so many happy memories, even when it had to be adjusted to cope with some visual problems of mine before and after retinal surgery last summer....until the machine refused to boot up. The spinning wheel of the Mac would never stop spinning. Off to the Apple store and the terminal diagnosis (literally).

Last night I took the new one upstairs with some reluctance, unpacked it, set it up, and used Apple's Time Machine to make it exactly like the one standing forlornly in the front hall, waiting to be recycled or sold for parts. I was glad when the screen showed up, and everything looked familiar.

But in my heart of hearts, I knew that although the new one was faster, could leap tall mountains of data with ease, and might replace its predecessor in my heart, it would take time for the memories of the G5 to fade away.

There are those who believe that technology dominates our lives too much and erodes the importance of personal relationships, and I suppose that that view is more widely shared than you and I might think. So it's essential that we put the computer into sleep mode and engage the world directly and not via some sort of screen.

Take a walk, invite somebody over for tea, call up an old friend, argue with a relative about politics, watch the sun rise or set or the light of the moon on the new fallen snow.

While I have never fallen in love with an object (as one of the characters in "Boston Legal" has this season), I really enjoyed my late, great computer; it made me feel as I did decades ago when I owned an Austin Healey sports car. I had hair then, and tooling around in that machine was as much fun as exploring the world of the internet. I still miss that car, along with my first shortwave radio, my first KLH stereo, my first TV, and that Mac Classic with 64k of RAM (all I'd ever need).

Guess I'd better get in touch with the people at "Boston Legal," after I pay a proper farewell to the G5.

But then, maybe I just have. Goodbye, friend. Thanks for all you did.