COMPUTER CATASTROPHE

COMPUTER CATASTROPHE
Over a decade ago, my wife and I decided to buy a home computer. I was very much against it at first thinking that I didn’t want anything in the house smarter than I.. But at long last, my children convinced me that they would be social outcasts if I did not get one. I consented and found my life completely changed. I could keep my schedule on the computer, my grades, my investment portfolio, my lectures, my books I was writing, my concert engagements. It was amazing, and quickly we became very dependent upon the wonder of computers. One day, as my wife was showing me how to delete on a word processing program, something occurred that never happened before. The screen went dark, and an unusual sound was emitted from the computer. Unable to correct the situation or bring anything back up onto the screen, I was determined to fix it. I went to my tool box. I need to explain that my tool box is the yellow pages. . I called a “computer doctor” with the biggest add. He came in a fancy car, dressed in an expensive suit, and carried a costly attaché case. He went quickly to work asking my wife what she had done. She said “I pressed this button, then this button, then this button”. With that he began to shake his head and click his tongue. “I’m sorry” he said, “there is nothing I can do for you, you have erased the hard drive”. Not knowing the severity of the situation, I feigned understanding and asked him to get things going again. He explained, “everything you have put into this machine since you bought it, is now gone!” “I’m sorry”, he said. He was sorry, I was the one with my life ruined, and then he handed me a bill. I wanted another opinion. A second “doctor” (Steve Morrey) came, less well dressed with a ball cap and a mouth full of gum. He went to the machine and asked my wife what had happened. She went through the same process, upon which he said “this is going to be difficult”. I can’t tell you how much better that sounded than the clicking of a tongue! He said, “you have eliminated the order on the hard drive, all we have to do us put the order back”. I looked perplexed. He asked if we were from New York City. I don’t know how he suspected that, unless it was the 7 locks on the front door. I admitted that we were. He said, “do you have any idea how many names are in the Manhattan phone directory”? I told him something around 3 million, I suspect. He said, “imagine if during the night a wind came in a tore the book up into 3 million pieces, each piece containing a name and number. You get up the next morning to look up a number in a pile of pieces. You know the number is there, because you have seen it before, but because you are searching randomly, you get discouraged and give up. You’re computer works the same way. You have asked it to find something that you know is there. It believes you and is searching, but after a point, it too gets discouraged and gives up”. He explained, and proceeded to spend hours bringing order back onto the drive by identifying little bits (bytes) of data, then categorizing them. After a time, we were able to make sense of the data again and become productive again. Order did that.