Colonel Panic

It was the day before I was to complete my 3-day certification process so that I could get some letters behind my name, when something unexpected occurred.

Maybe I shouldn’t call it unexpected, because it had happened twice before. After a couple or three hours of work on one of the documents I needed to submit via UPS the following day, my iMac decided to lock up. There I was, right in the middle of my Adobe InDesign project, when everything just froze.

I didn’t cry, and I didn’t scream. I think I was numb. Long ago, I had accepted the fact that I was the one with the iMac that didn’t work.

I had saved my document on the hard drive and the jump drive—but with the computer frozen, even after powering it off and back on, how did I get the jump drive out without possibly destroying data? (You Mac users know what I’m talking about.)

I called my friendly compadrés at Apple Care. “You have a kernel panic,” noted the nice man with the Indian accent. “A Colonel Panic?” I responded. “Yes, a kernel panic.”

Well, this raised all sorts of questions in my mind. Was a Colonel Panic better or worse than the General Melee which was about to occur? The Boy Dentist wanted to know if the Colonel could give orders to Sergeant Chaos and Private I-Don’t-Give-a-D**n. And if Apple didn’t want to give me a new hard drive, would I have to appeal to the Joint Chiefs of Hysteria??

My friend from New Delhi agreed that it was time to haul the iMac into a service center and replace the hard drive. My immediate question, however, was, “Give it to me straight—can I get the jump drive out with my files intact?”

He advised me to do what I would have done without him—power the computer down and take out the jump drive. Hands shaking, I took it over to The Boy Dentists’s PC, plugged it in and opened Adobe InDesign. Michael Dell would be proud—on the Dell Dimension that we’ve had for 5 years with no problems, ever, the file opened, intact.