CLACK!
Or, The Sound of Immanent Self-Destruction
So this past weekend, I went to visit my family at New House. I also had a lot of story to write, and seeing as my desk there is still buried beneath boxes (which I know I'm not going to unpack until December) I set up my lovely laptop in the room known as the library. I sat myself down on the couch, and ran an internet cable up from the basement, and plugged in my speakers--had the whole deal going. It was lovely.
Now the only reason that any of this worked is that the computer I currently call mine is a laptop, as mentioned above. You may remember how way back in June I at last allowed my brother to upgrade my desktop computer, seeing as any time I tried to do anything it would either freeze up or give me warning messages about how my hard drive was full. He, however, couldn't make it work once he was finished, and didn't know what to do about that, so the temporary laptop that I was borrowing became, by necessity, my main (and only) computer.
Sometime over the last little while, my laptop has become a little noisy. I noticed this shortly after I moved into this apartment, but just sort of shrugged, because my computers have always made strange noises. When it's thinking about something, my computer goes "clickety-click-churning-click-CLACK! crunchy-churning-churning-CLACK!" Or something to that effect. The CLACK! is loud enough to be heard a room or two away when there's no other noise, so it's really quite the clack.
So there I was, all nicely set up in the library, computer actually on my lap, when my dad came in to talk to me. My computer was thinking about something. My father looked at me, and looked at the computer, and asked with an expression of great concern, "Does your computer always do that?"
"Pretty much, yeah," I told him.
"That's not good," he said. "It sounds like your hard drive's about to break."
Oh. Lovely. Apparently this joyful CLACK! is a sign of this computer's imminent self-destruction. To make matters more interesting, this laptop is a discontinued model, so if I need to replace the hard drive I'll have to find a used one.
But how bad can it really be, I wondered. I mean, after all, it's been happily clacking away for at least two months now. To quote my father, "Well, I hope it lasts another two weeks."
Yeah, I hope so too. Excuse me, I think I'll go back up "Peak of the Ocean" again.
