COMPUTERS
Daily Telegraph - April 2008

Computer troubles are, I realise, the last refuge of the hopeless columnist. From there it is but a small step to airplane food, why men like cars but women like shopping, or Terribly Amusing Things My Precocious Brat Said at the Weekend. In other words, being Richard Glover.

Allow me if you will this Gloverish moment, for I have this week received some very grave news: The data on my recently crashed computer is now - officially and completely - unrecoverable.

“Unrecoverable”. Contained within that word are six months of my journal, various half-written articles, almost every photo I've taken in three years - including trips to India, China, the Middle East and various other exotic, never-to-be-repeated locations - and, most unspeakable of all, 20,000 words of my new book.

And yes, for the record, that last one really, really stung.

In movies when writers lose their books (strange the number of films featuring this comparatively rare event), it's always in appropriately dramatic circumstances. Manuscripts are left on trains, blown away in the wind, fed into roaring fires or dropped, page by page, off an ocean liner. In this way we are made to understand that the book wasn't just a book but a symbol of something holding the writer back.

Losing the book is a liberation. The writer learns a valuable lesson. He either returns to his study and begins to write a masterpiece or barges into the captain's cabin and announces, “Dammit, Janice, you know you're the only woman for me!”

Not me. The book was awesome and the rest of my life is just dandy, thanks. If this was some unconscious act of Freudian self-sabotage then the only lesson it taught me was to switch to using a pencil.

Computers and I have never got along well. Whether it is merely coincidence that I also tend not to get along with people who understand them remains unclear. Nevertheless, I resent being lectured on the importance of backing-up files by an overweight 45-year-old collector of Star Wars memorabilia moments after I lost everything I ever worked for.

Theoretically, I know I'm supposed to back up my files, but only in the same way I know I'm supposed to floss, pay my taxes or report to my parole officer once a week. Seriously, is it so unreasonable to expect a computer you paid almost two grand for to have a life cycle greater than four years? What is this thing, a tropical fish?

So I repeat: DO NOT TELL ME I SHOULD HAVE BACKED UP MY FILES UNLESS YOU WOULD LIKE ME TO TAKE YOUR YODA PUPPET AND CRAM IT DOWN YOUR FAT, SMUG THROAT.

Seriously, just don't do it. Unless you want tp learn the real meaning of “fatal error”.

© Brendan Shanahan 2008