I’ll buy a new Mac, if only they can tell me what’s wrong with the one I have!

Greetings from Computer Hell, a village where I’ve resided for the past two days when my Mac Pro decided it would allow the cursor to move, but not the screen. Huh? I mean the music is playing, but you just can’t click on anything and when you do a restart, it won’t.

That’s when I got scared. It’s a modern operating system, built upon Unix, supposedly inviolate, not only is this not supposed to happen, it doesn’t. But it did!

And I performed a few tweaks and when the problem evidenced itself again I decided to build a whole new drive, from scratch. Know how long that takes? Either you do or you don’t, either you know what’s going on under the hood or you don’t, and now you don’t have to. Because computers are like cars, they just work.

But mine didn’t.

Not that this is my first Mac to crap out on July 4th. But I was stunned that the Genius Bar was open, and I made an appointment, and worried about schlepping the behemoth of a computer down the Third Street Promenade I checked Waze and found you couldn’t get near Santa Monica, so I switched to Century City. Yup, want to get your computer fixed, 7/4’s the day, the schedule was WIDE OPEN!

Well, not exactly, but there were options.

Still, I left early.

But it was like the ’84 Olympics, there was no traffic. I was the only car on the road, it was like the 1940s.

And an employee helped me get the ‘puter from the car to the store.

And the Genius who helped me…

The Genius Bar gets a bad rap. Hell, all of Apple now gets a bad rap. Supposedly they aren’t, geniuses that is. But my guy was. Hunter had graduated from Berkeley, had gotten into medical school, but he deferred that when his mother got sick and ultimately died.

So what’s wrong with my Mac?

They assume you know nothing until they do, then you can speak console and crash and still, it wasn’t clear what was up. Was it software or hardware? He thought software, and I’d run the hardware test. But if it’s the OS… You mean I’ve got to spend days reinstalling and reconfiguring just to diagnose?

I certainly hope not.

But I’m not dropping thousands on a new computer just to find I have the same problem, that it’s somewhere deep in my data. And today data is everything.

That’s our number one possession, not a car or a house, but our data, our 1’s and 0’s, sitting on our devices, interconnected, and we don’t want to lose it.

And I was thinking of buying a new computer, because this one can’t be upgraded to Yosemite, and it’d be cool to have all my machines talk. But I couldn’t pull the trigger, and then this.

Ain’t that how life works. You’ve got it all planned out, and then the unforeseen occurs, totally altering your course.

You’re thinking about how to spend your money, and then you get fired.

You’re thinking about breaking up, and then the other person becomes ill. Or you’re working up the courage to ask someone on a date, and the next time you see them they’re flashing a ring.

So do you aggressively eat up life or let it come to you? Do you try to alter the course of the river or realize that’s impossible, and just go with the flow?

So Hunter’s gonna keep my machine for a couple of days, run all kinds of tests, and I hope he comes up with something definitive. And the great thing about computers is it’s always something, it’s just a matter of finding it. But that can take days, a week, of frustrating experience.

And mostly we’re on our own. That’s the twenty first century mantra. There’s no help. Especially if you don’t pay. But even if you do, there’s no manual, no one to call, products are exceptional, but everybody’s a mechanic, intermittently. We’re all experts on something, just different things.

So I thank god for the Genius Bar. At least it’s their problem for a couple of days.

But soon, it could be mine.

Note: If it’s the data, buying a new machine will not only be superfluous, it might exhibit the same problem. And I could delineate the difference between Time Machine migration and hand migration but your head will spin. But the point is, I want answers. And right now, I don’t have any. I’m alone at the prom.