So last night my iMac G5 died a horrible death. It was my own fault; the system prompted me to download some software update, I can’t even remember which one, and I foolishly did what it told me, and when the system went to restart, it didn’t. The last time things went horribly wrong was last November, and of course that time they went horribly wrong in a very different way. Worse, there was already a disc in the disc drive, and I couldn’t get it to eject for love or money, so I couldn’t run a fix from the OS discs.

This was extremely hard on my family, because it involved about an hour of me cussing and swearing and finding the Apple support telephone number shut down for the night, and also telling people to shut up a lot, because there is something about families that makes them start bugging the hell out of you while you’re struggling to fix the computer. I’m the family computer expert, which is really bad, bad news for our family, and Ben is no help. Finally I stomped off to bed in a huff, the computer still unfixed.

Getting the disc ejected and restoring the system took me the entire morning and 45 minutes on the phone with two different Apple support guys, one of whom was cheerily helpful and the other of whom was a complete fucking idiot. I ended up having to reinstall the OS, and Firefox, and probably God knows what else that I haven’t discovered yet, but it looks like my data wound up unscathed.

My family and I, on the other hand, are very much the worse for wear. It’s scary how much the iMac has become our lifeline; I was going out of my freaking mind without it.