Dodging a bullet

I can't help but think that I dodged a serious cyber bullet.

A couple of months ago, I was fooling around on my laptop when it suddenly decided to exercise a mind of its own. This made me a little nervous because I've been thinking for a long time now that computers are way smarter than I am, which is why I require IT people. I want them to hold my hand even when I'm logging on. I want them to comfort and assure me at every turn. I want them to whisper soothing words and wipe the sweat off my furrowed brow when I ask my what-do-I-do-now questions.

Anyway, when I tried what I thought would be a problem-solving reboot, it took forever for the screen to come back to life. And whatever processing was left went verrrrrr-y slowwwww-ly.

Uh-oh.

So I took the laptop to my friends, Conrad and Amy McKnight, at Triad PC Repair on Main Street. They've been my go-to computer people for several years now and they have performed several mini-miracles for me over the course of time.

Apparently, I needed another one. That's the thing with miracles: one is never enough.

My five-year-old MacBook Pro had finally expired with hard-drive failure. Apparently, Mac's time had come.

Uh-oh, again. Because I had no backup.

I wasn't on the cloud, and my GoFlex Time Machine – which I had been using for backup – had malfunctioned several months earlier. I always figured I had time to get a new Time Machine, but I never did get one. Silly me.

So now here I was, in deep laptop do-do.

And, as things like this do, it came at a bad financial time. We'd just had our house painted. I'm still making car payments, and Kim needed work done on her car. I just put a new set of tires on my car. We'd just completed some internal ceiling work to fix a leak in our 100-year-old bungalow. I bought a new watch a few months earlier to replace my 25-year-old antique. Jeez, the year started with me buying a new TV.

And now this.

So we saved our money, trying not to break into our savings or checking accounts, or 401ks or equity lines if we could help it.

But a week ago, we finally got a new MacBook Pro (with solid state drive), and I anxiously took it to Conrad to see if he could coax a data transfer from my dead Mac into my new one. I held my breath all day. I had visions of lost pictures, lost emails, lost passwords, lost documents and anything else I didn't want lost.

Then, later in the day, Amy texted me. My computer was ready.

I brought it home. I fired it up. And everything was there. Everything. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I don't know how Conrad did it. I can't sing his praises enough. If he's not a genius, he's at least a wizard. At least, that's what I think.

So here I am, up and running and back online, waiting to dodge my next cyber bullet.