Formatted

For some reason or the other, our computer crashed. By “crash”, I do not mean that I jammed against it while somnambulating (my mass is too small to create a huge momentum); or that, by a sudden increase in the earth’s gravitational pull, it fell onto the floor and was broken into smithereens.

It crashed because a virus that goes by the stupidly notorious name, Brontok, had deviously entered our local system from Yakal’s computer network (someone may have downloaded MP3’s or movies from an infected computer), multiplied upon contact with some of our very important files—and these processes led to an eventual but unfortunate lysis of the PC. Uhm, not “lysis.” It’s supposed to be “breakdown.”

My brother and I, clueless and ignorant as we were (still are) of these things, didn’t immediately create back-up copies of our files nor transferred these files to a separate disk drive. After all, Manong is an English major (whose expertise is on Shakespeare and literature—and there is no literary piece that dwells on the subject of crashing computer systems!), and I am a molbio major (and biology defines viruses as organisms composed of capsomeres and DNA’s and all that jazz). In effect, our knowledge of technological things is reduced to using Microsoft Word—and some other things, so how were we supposed to kill the virus?

You get my point.

On the outset of the virus infection, our system became miserably slow—I had to wait for a thousand years for some programs to open, and I couldn’t chat with my lab groupmates. And then, there came a point when it refused to restart. It just won’t. I’ve asked help from the enlightened ones—the beings who breathe and eat technology, and probably dream about them—and after tweaking with the PC in its degenerated state, all they could recommend was, “I-reformat na lang.”

But that would mean:

1. We’d both lose our files,
2. We’d both lose our files, and
3. We’d both lose our files.

There was no other way. Goodbye, beloved files. I hope to see you again soon.

But here we are: the old has gone, the new has come. And our PC, with its breath of fresh air, seems to be enjoying its new life.