I was terrified.

Was it a big hairy spider? A home invader? A tornado? A threatened lawsuit? A burst pipe? A volcanic eruption (in New England, that would really be something else!) ... ?

No. My computer refused to boot. It got to the "welcome" screen then just sat there. Going around and around and around. It has never done that. It was fine when we left to go to the grocery store. No blue screens of death or anything at all. It was computering along uncomplaining. Fine, thank you.

But. It. Would. Not. Boot.

I put it in "safe mode with networking" and restored it to the last save point ... two days ago. And now, it's fine again. No idea what happened except for a tiny, brief message that said "new drivers installed" then vanished -- this while it was in "safe mode." What drivers? I didn't install any new equipment and the only driver I regularly upgrade is for my graphics card.

So I have no idea what happened, but my heart is pounding and I've got a headache. I think my blood pressure just went into the stratosphere.

Although the computer is essential to my life, in fact everything on it would be easy enough to restore. Photographs and documents are safely stored on two external hard drives. My virtual life is on various clouds somewhere out in the Ether World -- WordPress, Google, the bank, Amazon and probably a few others I can't think of offhand. Other than Photoshop which I have on DVD, all my software is easy enough to replace by downloading.  Yet having my computer not boot filled me with dread and a horrible feeling of powerlessness. I think I'm less afraid of spiders ... and that's saying something because I'm really phobic about arachnids.

I will never know what happened. A virus? A bad download? Nothing is supposed to download to this system without my permission. It's one of the reasons I don't like Windows 10. You can't turn off automatic downloads. I hate when things happen and I have no control over them.

If I wasn't sure how important my computer is in my world, this absolutely showed me the bare, ugly truth. I need my computer like I need air. How did it come to this?

And wasn't it a long way down.

THROWING THE WORLD AWAY

The computer industry has declared me -- and everyone like me -- obsolete. Irrelevant. We can't afford subscriptions to "keep us up to date." Worse, keeping up to date isn't a major issue in our lives. I don't mind running a version or two behind as long as the tools I've got get the job done. I can go years without repurchasing my software. I guess they don't make enough money selling new releases to folks like us. Yeah, that's probably it.

If you -- like me -- are one of the millions of computer users who live on fixed incomes or are just plain poor, you're barely able to keep a roof over your head and food on the table. You are NOT subscribing. To anything.

A couple of days ago, I got my "You've Been Hacked!" letter from Adobe. This has affected (depending on who you believe) between 38 and 150 million people. All of us have had our personal information stolen and quite probably sold to hackers. Doesn't anyone but me find this alarming? I am less than ever interested in anything requiring I store my files on any but on a device I own and keep in my home.

Yes, I know the house could burn to the ground and all my backups would be lost. If that, God forbid, should happen I will be otherwise occupied trying to put my life back together. Worrying about lost data is not going to be my primary issue. I'm not a business, you see. I'm a person. (What's a person, daddy? Is it a new kind of corporation?)

When my PCs stop working, which they don't do more than once in a deeply cyanotic moon, I call the Guy Who 75-WorkingNIK-CR-87Fixes PCs. He comes to the house.  Replaces the broken bits. Cleans out the virus that bypassed the safeguards and generally tunes it up. I give him a hundred bucks, he gives me a card with his number on it so if the problems come back, he will return and fix'em.

Am I the only one who is in no position to just dump equipment and replace it? No way could I afford that. I'm still in debt for the stuff I have. Moreover, I deplore the throwaway society we are building and the mindset that comes with it.

Disposability it not good. It's not an improvement. It's destroying our environment. Polluting landfills. Making an already profligate society more thoughtless and wasteful. It's the definition of where and how we've gone wrong.

Does no one in the computer industry look at business in a wider social context? Realize what a dangerous path we are treading? If one thing is going to doom our world, throwing stuff away rather than fixing it will be our route to damnation.

There was a time when Garry and I were working a ridiculous number of hours and started using paper plates. To avoid washing dishes. After doing this for a while, one day, I found myself washing the paper plates. I couldn't bear the idea of throwing them out. It seemed wrong. Wasteful. That was when I rediscovered the concept of reusability. I had actual dishes in the cupboard. I could use them, wash them -- and use them again! Epiphany!

We are turning into a world of paper plate users. Everything, from your car to your computer, to your kitchen appliances. It's all junk. When it stops running, dump it. Don't even think about fixing it. Change your cell phone every six months. Toss the old one. Somewhere on this planet, there is a giant, bottomless hole into which the garbage goes and it will never fill up, right? If you keep believing that, maybe the house brownies will come and clean for you while you sleep.

I'm not expecting answers. I'll be dead before anyone looks around and says "Whoa ... this isn't so good. What about building things we can repair. You know. Reuse."

Footnote: In an insult-to-injury attempt to avoid accepting blame, Adobe is blaming their mess on users with "stupid passwords" like 123456. Excuse me, but they didn't hack my computer. And Adobe is still trying to get me to subscribe to their cloud. What's wrong with this picture?