Deus ex machine

After putting my two-month old baby to sleep, I quietly left the room and got my computer. I rarely surfed the Internet when he was a newborn and I used the times he was asleep to pay my own sleep debts. Now that he is a bit older and is sleeping longer, I have been able to check my favorite websites and answer emails in a more timely manner.

It was early in the morning when I went to the kitchen with hopes of enjoying a cup of tea before the baby woke up. I switched on my computer and was greeted by a white screen. Thinking I was out of power, I plugged it, switched it off, and turned it back on again. The same white screen appeared. I felt like a child looking forward to a visit to an ice cream shop who finds that it is closed when she gets there.

I realized that my four year-old computer had conked out and that it was possible that all my files were gone: documents from work, vacation pictures, over four thousand songs, school papers I was still working on, and other items I’ll probably remember when I need to use them. I could hear my husband’s voice telling me “I told you so.” He had bought me an external hard drive and reminded me to back up my files. I never took it out of its box. My husband eventually copied the files himself. That was over a year ago.

I am lucky to have a husband who loves computers and other techie stuff. He took care of getting my computer fixed. The diagnosis was a crashed hard disk drive. I was told that it was possible to retrieve my files. A Singapore-based company provided that service. All I had to do was ship my old drive and pay. I found myself saying that I did not want to. I liked the feeling of starting over. And the computer, without the accumulated files from four years, ran much faster.

I think of the crashed hard disk drive as an opportunity to purge elements of my life that are no longer relevant to where I am now. Of the four thousand songs I had copied from CDs to it, I probably listened to less than five hundred regularly. I had uploaded the pictures I liked best in Facebook and my old Multiply site. Most importantly, I’m not really sure I still want to go back to drafting joint venture agreements and petitions for certiorari.  Most of the files I had in my crashed hard disk drive were files I meant to erase but did not because I thought I might eventually need them.

It’s been two weeks since the crash and I’m doing fine. When I needed certain documents, I found copies in old emails. When I needed pictures for a presentation, I copied them from my Facebook and Multiply sites. When I wanted to listen to a song, I just searched for it in YouTube. I will probably copy my best-loved CDs eventually.

Deus ex machina or “god in a machine” is a literary device where a problem that seems hopeless gets resolved by some unexpected, if contrived, event. Various websites say that it originated from ancient Greek drama where the actor who played a god was lowered by a crane. In some stories, the god made happy endings possible.

I think of the crashing of my computer as deus ex machina, if a very literal one. Since the work I did before I gave birth was not always consistent with what I claimed to have wanted out of life (to spend more time with my family and to focus my practice on art, cultural heritage and environmental law),  God/Goddess/the Universe answered my prayers and erased my hard disk drive. I better take advantage of it to get my happy ending.