Six Hours of Panic

...and some people have progress thrust upon them.

My old computer, tho not my oldest one, died recently and I was without much of anything in the way of information technology for about a week. In that time I tried, unsuccessfully, to resurrect it for maybe the third or fourth time in its little electronic life, but to no avail.

In the end, the motherboard had passed its final bits of instruction and I was left with a box that would, at best, present me with the bios screen. After exhausting my admittedly limited bag of tricks, I sulked, fidgeted, advanced through two or three stages of grief, and finally bit the bullet and drove over to Fry's to pick up a cheap replacement machine.

One that runs Vista and came with something like two hundred times as much ram as my first PC had hard disk storage. To be honest, it doesn't run much quicker than that old one, but it's prettier.

I then was faced with a fresh, clean machine that lacked every application and feature I wanted, so I burned up the Internet downloading utilities, malware detectors, programs, fonts, and drivers. And, because it's a Windows box, spent a lot of time waiting for it to reboot.

I ended up buying, also, a new interface that would let me access hard disks in the old machine because the one I had inexplicably wouldn't work. During the days of reconstruction, for reasons I wont' get into, I also killed my laptop, which is now useless, all in a vain attempt to recover some missing data. I can now read everything from that old drive, but of course, I can't just copy things over like in the good ol' days.

This new (to me) Vista is quite painful to deal with on an extended basis, but I'm giving it a shot. There seems to be even less that's easy to find than ever before, but that's the reverse side of the "user friendly" coin in every situation. The worst thing about Vista, for me, is that I don't really see any benefit to it over Windows XP, but I'm sure there is one.

I did install Rocket Dock, which I think is pretty neat, and I suggest that everyone using Vista give it a try. I like it much better than the start button or the quick launch tray, and it's a good way for me to keep the desktop free of all the clutter.

In the midst of all my updating, when I was checking my e-mail, I froze. I had to enter my password, and although I had no trouble putting it in three or four times previously and had even adopted that password for my login to the machine, I forgot what it was. Well, not entirely, only everything after the first four characters.

I'd drawn a blank about what it was once before, a few years ago, and made a note of it somewhere, but I had no idea where it was. It's also the password for my Password Safe password remembering program, and I began to panic. I'm pretty good, I think, at remembering these things, and this particular password was one that I was given by an old Internet Service Provider over fifteen years ago. It's eleven characters long (I now know), has all that mixed case and other crap, and I've used it two or three times a day for all that time.

Still, I looked at the screen, and couldn't remember the whole thing. Not even with body memory.

Years ago I stood in front of an ATM and had a similar experience. I didn't know my PIN, even though I'd used it several times a week for a few years, and in that instance not only did I not remember what it was, I could sense the hole in my mind where it should be and knew that I would never remember it, that the PIN's spot was, indeed, empty.

I panicked when I considered that might be the case with my password, so I immediately ran away from the computer to watch some Olympics in hopes that the password would pop into my mind. I refused to believe it was gone for good, like that PIN, but the possibility nagged at me. Sure, I'm getting older, but I'm far too young to be suffering early dementia.

For the next several hours I tried, unsuccessfully, to avoid trying to think about what my password might be. I couldn't shut down the computer for fear of never getting it back running, and I was in no mood to do a restore and use a different password since that would undo the past couple day's work. I don't think I spent longer than a minute watching women's volleyball and boxing without thinking of the lost password, and the more possibilities I came up and tried, the more desperate and dismal I became.

In the end, I remembered it. That's how I know how long it is. Everything works now and I even wrote the password down on a slip of paper and put it in a safe place I'm sure to forget. But, in the meantime, I can compute, surf the Internet, and do many of the pastimes I enjoy. What I can't do is keep from wondering what I'll forget next.