Knock Three Times

The end of the trilogy. Each week you've had that annoying "wanting more" feeling at the conclusion of the post. Your hero was tested again and again times with new challenges; the narratives and themes were enduring, or at least I thought so.

Trilogies are the sign of a serious reader. Now it draws to a close, and I promise a happy ending.

Twelve hours after the last post, there I sat, watching and waiting. The hard drive light barely flickering, hopeful yet resigned to the fact that is was a lost cause. In this case, recovering the drive would not be an exercise in convenience; nothing, and I mean nothing, was duplicated elsewhere. MP3s ripped from CDs, iTunes downloads, pictures...it was all there locked in the non-responsive drive.

I did what any hard working family IT support person that was lacking sleep would do: I took it to Best Buy.

They poked and prodded, looking for signs of life. The first guy disappeared, replaced by a second, and then a third. The decision was hard drive failure. A new hard drive, data recovery and their magic to make it happen was pretty darn close to $400. Holy moley. The laptop was in plain view the entire time and there wasn't one bit of real diagnosis that went on.

Now armed with a dislike for geeks in ties, the laptop and I went home. Little did they know who they were dealing with. They even provided a clue as to what may have caused the problem: perhaps Windows choked on the last update it never completed running. A sense of renewal came over me, and I was ready to tackle it again. Out came the hard drive; when I slaved it to my desktop it ran fine. I copied the necessary files from it, and popped it back in the laptop. Time for recovery mode. Follow the instructions, click this, tab that and don't forget that ALL DATA WILL BE ERASED ON YOUR HARD DRIVE IF YOU PROCEED.

Jeez...was all caps really necessary?

A scant thirty minutes later the laptop was running like it was 2009 and fresh out of the box. It took another four hours to download every Windows update necessary to bring everything up to date.

It's been said that binary logic will always be inferior to human intuitive ability. I reaffirmed this, triumphant over the machine that tormented, troubled and distressed me. The story has been told to the end; the trilogy is finished.