One bright Saturday morning, you get up and decide to check email before you get to laundry and myriad other chores. You push the power button on the computer and up comes the Blue Screen of Death. At first, you think it’s no big deal and you try to reboot it. Nope, it’s gone. Okay, plan B, talk to a friend who knows a bit more than you do about this gadget you use on a daily basis. Still not too worried, but by now it’s been a couple of days and you realize you forgot to respond to an email or finish setting up a new account somewhere.

Your friend gives you the bad news. A couple of sectors in your hard drive perish. What does that mean, you wonder? It means you don’t have to worry about that email you forgot to respond do, it’s in Neverland now. As are all your other emails, contacts, etcetera.

Now, you’ve had about a week to really let things sink in and you begin to recall things you’d downloaded, saved, and meant to backup on your computer (but, of course, hadn’t yet). Oh crap, I've got everything on there! Withdrawals and a wee bit of panic set in as you wait to find out the verdict on whether or not your buddy has been able to recover any of your information. You consider that, in the event your machine gets up and going again, you’ve got 7 hours worth of critical updates waiting at Microsoft (because you have dialup, of course). And then there are all of your programs to reload.

In a moment of pure paranoia (likely somewhere in the 2 a.m. area on a weeknight), you start to wonder what would happen if your bank experienced this and you couldn’t get to your directly deposited check or your automatically withdrawn payments on everything. Your debit card dinna work and oops! You wrote your last check last month and forgot to order more (because you hardly ever use them anymore). Not only do you miss your computer and all your cyber-hangouts, you feel guilty because in the big scheme of things, your wee computer with it’s little databank isn’t all that much to lose. Or is it?

We’ve moved into a different world, a world where more people than not are now published authors, whether they ever earn royalties or not. We (as a whole) use this electronic gadget in so many aspects of our lives- the aforementioned banking, shopping, chatting, research, entertainment, even sexual flirtations, dating, and marriage.

So when it’s turned off, quite literally, a big chunk of what we do is turned off with it. That’s a little scary, to me. I just went two weeks without this machine, and loved/hated all of it. While an external drive or a jump card seems smart, so does backing away a little. Setting aside a little actual green in the event that the bank goes through this same experience, ever. Making a point of gathering the snail mail and phone numbers of the correspondents I’ve met online who really mean something special to me- and hoping I remember how to write by hand. Giving my eyeballs and brain cells more frequent breaks and amazing myself at how much I really CAN get done when I’m not sitting here at the keyboard…