Another thread pulled

When I said this blog would show the unravelling of a mind, I might not have been aware of just how unravelled it was already.

I’ve just spent an hour or so, maybe less, talking to an external hard drive, starting quite nicely like friendly GP and building up to threats of unspeakable violence.  Oddly enough, it didn’t respond to either.

It wouldn’t respond to anything though, and that was the thing that set me off.  It’s a half full one terabyte expansion drive on which I store my music, my photos, and my general files that no longer needs to be on C.  Losing it would be a huge loss of data.  You could call that the stresser if you were looking to profile my behaviour.

It just stopped connecting for no apparent reason.  The laptop told me.  It didn’t send any sort of message itself.  I thought perhaps it had had a falling out with this laptop, so I recalled the old one out of its semi-retirement (it had to cut its duties owing to injury and ill health) and watched to see if the external drive would still talk to its old friend.  It wouldn’t.  It was clearly having some kind of major tantrum.

Well, what do you do when someone has a tantrum?  You take away their sweets and you give them the silent treatment, so I did the same (pulled all the cables).  I gave it a while to think about its obstinacy then returned its food and social sources.  It still wasn’t talking.

Time to get nasty.  No violence to it – it has all my data after all and I don’t want to damage it.  This was clearly a communication problem and the only way to make it talk was to scare the hell out of it.

So I reconnected it to the new laptop and since it still seemed to be sitting there with its arms folded and nose in the air, I decided to spook it.  You’ve seen it before.  People get a fright and suddenly they start jabbering away and looking to communicate with anyone just to have a sense of normality.  There it was with every opportunity given to it for an amicable response and still nothing.  So I systematically killed all of its connections, one by one until it was left connected to what was technically a dead body.  It can’t unplug itself.  It’s stuck there until I do something for it.  Imagine if someone left you chained to a dead body.  You’d probably be a bit worried.

I left it to think for a while, let the panic build a bit then I slowly reactivated the connections, in reverse order so it had time to worry it still might be chained to something horribly maimed.  As the last one activated, it whirred into life and started talking frantically to the laptop.

It’s still talking freely, handing over my data when requested and generally being a good little external drive.  Technically I tortured it, but it has no legal rights and I’m the only one that thinks it’s even remotely alive.

But that’s sort of the point.  I do think everything’s alive.  I apologise to inanimate objects.  I was wracked with guilt and sorrow when the old laptop, which still came to my aid today, became poorly.  If I pick up a soft toy in a shop somewhere, I nearly always feel compelled to buy it because I’ve given it the hope that it might be getting a new home.  I carefully avoid going to animal shelters because I can’t tear myself away from the first pair of big brown eyes, let alone let them see me talking to another dog.  Dogs are different, yes, and they do get excited that someone might take care of them.  But hard drives?  I’ve done it all my life.  I anthropomorphise everything.  I upgrade nothing because it would be that talking to another dog feeling.  It’s crazy behaviour and I know it, but I can’t control it.  The fact that a whole story about how I tortured a hard drive should really give me pause, but it doesn’t.  I am unravelled.  Perhaps I should have started this blog to help me pick up the threads instead of finding another loose one and pulling…