Well, well, what have we here?

A few weeks ago we had an exceptionally severe winter storm, with snow, freezing rain and high winds. The combination caused many trees to come down, bringing overhead power lines with them. One casualty of the storm was our desktop computer. A series of power surges, as the electricity went off, on, off, on for an hour or so before going off altogether, was too much for the mysterious inner workings of our machine. When hydro was finally restored a day later, the computer refused to turn on.

I'm pretty self-sufficient when it comes to software problems, but dealing with the hardware is quite another matter. I wasn't at all happy about taking the machine somewhere to be fixed. What would strangers find on the hard drives? Why hadn't I cleared my browser history? What about all the shortcuts to spanking blogs? The browser would probably open up to my Blogger account for the blog. Eek!

But really, I had no choice, and I consoled myself by deciding that anyone who repairs computers for a living has probably seen it all. So as soon as the roads were cleared and safe for driving, I disconnected our computer - carefully labeling all the wires and cables so I would know where each one went - and we drove off to the nearest repair shop.

Our problem was a common one caused by the violent storm, and the technician had seen several cases exactly like ours in the previous 24 hours. He promised to fix it within the hour, so we went for lunch then came back to pick it up.

When we returned, it was ready to go.

"It works fine," the technician said. 'I turned it on. I like your desktop!"

My desktop? What on earth was on the desktop? I couldn't remember. Did I have shortcuts to spanking sites? Blog pictures? My mind was blank.

"Thanks," said Ron, and he looked quite pleased. Then I realized that they were referring to the wallpaper on the desktop. Ron has a series of satirical political cartoons and photos that he likes to display, and obviously his latest was a hit with the guys in the shop. I breathed a sigh of relief!

Our computer worked better than ever, and the first thing I did once it was up and running again was back up all our important files and pictures, and move all blogging-related items to a flash drive.

Update: Sadly, our hard drive collapsed a few days ago, and in view of its age, we opted to buy a new machine rather than spend any more money on the old one. We went back to the same shop and bought a brand new computer with much more capability and a newer operating system. Again I had a moment of panic when I asked for the data to be transferred from the old machine to the new, but I really didn't have any choice.  I felt mixed emotions when I received a phone call from the technician later that day, telling me he had been unable to retrieve any files from the old hard drive. Once again I had escaped detection, and the backup from a month ago meant that we had lost little.