Living in a virtual world

Being Frank, by Frank Ameduri

I met a guy a few years ago who was supposed to be one of the most knowledgeable people about the Internet. I asked him about the Y2K scare, and whether or not he really thought the entire 'net could collapse.

"Who knows?" he said. "Each person, even the smartest ones, can only know a tiny bit about the Internet as it exists today, and nobody really has the slightest idea about how it all works together any more."

"So one major problem could theoretically bring the whole thing down."

"It could."

"Or then again, it might not."

"Right."

That's about as much sense as all things technical make to me. I'm the guy who only knows two ways to fix computer problems. 1. Turn it off and then on again and see what happens. 2. Call a smart person who knows which other buttons to push. The unfortunate thing is that I am a complete slave to my computer. It's like needing your car to drive across the Sahara, but not knowing how to turn it back on again should it stall.

I came into the office early on Thursday morning, and our IT person was sitting at my desk. There were things on top of my computer that looked like they were once inside my computer. On the monitor was a small box with a question mark in it. That's what Macs do when they want to be clear about the fact that, no matter what's wrong, it's not their fault. It's the computer's way of saying, "I have no idea what you just did, but it wasn't good."

The IT person turned to me and said, "I'm really sorry." Those are the three words you never want to hear from your IT person. There's an instinctive human response for those very rare moments when you become instantly convinced the universe may be imploding. That response is involuntarily triggered when any IT person says, "I'm really sorry."

My knees went weak, I began sweating and my left arm started tingling.

"Are you OK?" she asked me.

"Is it … dead?"

"I tried everything, but I couldn't save it. It's the hard drive, I think."

The truth is, I don't know what a hard drive is. I know it must be really important, because everyone tells me to be sure to save things to the hard drive. As long as it's on the hard drive, it seems, everything will be just fine. Just fine until the hard drive goes belly up, that is. Everything that keeps my life on an even keel was on that hard drive -- my phone list, my log of phone messages, my planning sheets for the newspaper and the request sheets that make it possible to put each edition together, all of that was on the hard drive. My annual goals, and all the long-term projects were on there. I began to feel light-headed.

Fifteen minutes later, I woke up with the IT person calling 911 and Casey Ressler holding a brown paper bag over my face. "Just breathe easy, Frank. Don't try to get up."

It's Friday now, and the computer is still down. We called in a computer guy young enough to be my son, and he's feeling confident he can get the machine back on its feet. He's a good kid. He makes house calls and, as far as I can tell, he works for food and spare parts. He also has a Fonzie-like way with computers. He's like the Mac Whisperer and the Who's pinball wizard all wrapped into one. If he succeeds in pulling a Lazarus maneuver on my computer, I'll have reason to go on. If he fails, I'll be reduced to the lowest form of humanity -- I'll be computer-less. A lost soul with no address on the Internet and no evidence of my former virtual greatness, or of the last year's worth of work for that matter.

That's what computers have done for us really. Just when we started to get some of the basics of the real universe figured out, like how to microwave eggs, we created a new, more mysterious virtual universe. "I really don't even know how any of it works anymore," the Internet expert said. "It's become it's own thing; it's got a life of its own, and we're just along for the ride." That's all well and good until your hard drive becomes a paper weight and everyone else in the office tells you to stay away from their computers.

"It's not like cooties," I tell them. But the truth is, I have no idea. For all I know there are virtual cooties, and I'm a carrier. I'll have to ask the Mac Whisperer when I see him next.

Frank Ameduri is not allowed near electronic gadgets.