Monday, December 7, 2009

I'll Be In A Hobo Jungle With My Hard Drives

I'm lugging so much computer stuff around now, it's funny. I need a tutorial just to figure out what all the cords I have go to. Then there's all the power strips, with such a confused tangle even the electric company doesn't know what's going on.

This keyboard is behind this computer, and one of these mice goes to it. I just came home with another power strip and a 4 port USB hub. The hard drives have to go somewhere, along with the wireless mouse, which actually does have a wire, sticking on its little transmitter.

As for my hard drives, I baby them, and protect them, from all physical harm and from thieves. It's my daily paranoid obsession that someone is going to steal them. If they went, the dollar value would be negligible, of course, but it's the information and the hundreds of thousands of files on them that would be tough to lose.

I have email files from the '90s on there, and practically everything I've ever done since early 1996. And some of it there are several copies of, because at one time keeping files safe was a lot harder than now. With floppy discs, that never were perfected as far as I can tell. They failed so often, they're still failing in a parallel universe.

People see me walking along. There's the guy with that box of hard drives. Wonder what he has on them that he's so protective of. I'll never tell. They go where I go. And if they don't go where I go, which they usually do, they're so well hidden they'd have to X-ray the house just to get a clue. But spare yourself the trouble, because they go where I go. Not to the health club or the grocery store, of course.

I can picture myself being homeless or being an outcast, out on my own, living by my wits. I'll be walking along the railroad track, looking for a place to stay under a trestle. And there I'll be, warming up a can of mulligan stew in a hobo jungle, me and my box of hard drives.

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