Farewell to the Square

After many years of loyal service, and not wanting to make a fuss, my computer monitor quietly flickered and went out in the middle of my website rebuild project. Wanting to resuscitate, and not wanting to believe the worst, I immediately performed CPR by vigorously banging on each side of the monitor. "Stay with me, damn you! You can't leave me now! I need you!" One last slap on the monitor's face left nothing but a slightly greasy hand print. The last one I would ever leave.

The computer monitor's death (suicide?) immediately put me into a hostage situation. My critical spreadsheets had vanished; my new home page designs, my 6,000+ product inventory export, were all effectively trapped in the mysterious black box still humming contentedly (could this be murder?) below the desk. Without my trusted monitor to find them they might as well be in Australia.

Despite the fact that I would rather chew glass than go to Best Buy, I packed up the kids and went to Best Buy. It's amazing to me how the staff there can talk and gesticulate so expertly, yet be so completely unhelpful. I walked out with the same monitor I would have bought before the Geek demo, because it was the right size at the right price and I was a desperate woman.

My new monitor is rectangular, the old one was square. While the new one is technically only an inch larger, the fact that the inch comes in a landscape form instead of a box, makes a world of difference. The world seems a bigger place now, brighter too. And while I do think my old monitor should have done a better job of hanging on until the end of my rebuild (resentful much?), I've stopped missing it already.