Penned Thoughts

My Mac just saved my friggin’ butt! I worship it now. I was cursing it just a while ago and I love it now. I want to kiss it; I want to profess my love to it. Maybe take it to a candlelit dinner or something! I am not exaggerating and I’ve not gone loony.

Here’s what happened:

I had painstakingly typed out a long essay on my Mac. I had two TextEdit windows open - one had the points I was using and the other one had the essay. I was making changes after practically each word. I was poring over the minutest details, trying to get it just right. Because this is important stuff. I have to speak it in front of more than five hundred people tomorrow. Those are going to be three very nervous minutes for me. I had laboured like an ass.

When I was done, I just wanted to rehearse it in front of a friend of mine. I asked him to set the stopwatch and then sat up straight from my leaning position in front of my Mac. Then I pulled the notebook towards me. In a split second, the MagSafe power cord snapped out of the slot (it had got stuck under the foot of the bed) and all was dark. My Mac’s battery is in for replacement right now.

I howled. I literally howled. I fell back on the bed and tore at my hair. I cursed Apple. I cursed Steve Jobs. I cursed my Mac and my extreme faith in it, thinking that it could do me no wrong. I cursed computers. I cursed my very existence. I was in shock. What was I supposed to do now? I just could not gear myself up to write that whole thing again. It would never be as good. It was just impossible.

After a few minutes, I just pressed the power button again and let it boot up. All the while, I just wanted to throw something through that screen. When I entered my password, I literally punched the keys in. After that, I ran a Spotlight search for the words I knew were there in my prepared speech. Even if I could salvage a paragraph or two (through some temporary file or something), I’d at least have a base to build up on. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Zero.

So, I fired Pages. (I hated TextEdit with every breath in my body now.) I fiddled with the Preferences for no reason at all and then finally, knowing that I’d just have to get down to it, I started typing again. I had just typed ten words when my fingers typed the words “get lost dammit”. I’d just lost the enthusiasm I’d had a few minutes before. I couldn’t go through this again. I fell back on the bed again.

Thinking that maybe I should follow the method I’d followed the previous time, I thought that I should first jot down the points (most of which I’d now forgotten). So, grudgingly and with extreme revulsion, I launched TextEdit.

And that, my dear friends, was the point where I fell in love, all over again. The magic was back. My Mac had once again exceeded my expectations. I jumped in joy. I did a little jig. I shouted (literally shouted), “Macs rock! This is awesome. I friggin’ love this thing!” My friends, who’d been witness to the entire episode, must have thought I was on crack. But I could not help it. I beheld a sight so amazing, so brilliant… WOW!

There, right in the centre of the screen, were three TextEdit documents arranged in a neat cascade. The one on the back was an unimportant document where I’d jotted down something, the second one was the one with the points and in the front, standing like a galactic warrior emerging from a landslide, was my essay, exactly as I’d left it, accurate to the last exclamation mark. An unsaved document, typed in a tiny little application that comes for free on every Mac and one that we take for granted, had survived a cold reboot without any mess. It was a revelation. It was magical!

I love my existence now. I love computers. I love Macs and the extreme faith I had in it has now grown ten-fold (and I didn’t think that was possible). I love Steve Jobs. Above all, I love Apple!

Thank you, Apple! I promise you, as long as the company lives and keep churning out the unmatched, beautiful and super reliable Mac OS X operating system and keeps bundling them on its Macs, I’ll keep buying them. And my kids will buy them too. You truly have a customer for life. Congratulations!

-Aayush

Postscript: This is an article I wrote two years ago but is as relevant today as it was then. I just realised that I never published it on my blog, so I reproduced it as is. I hope you enjoyed it.