My Mac is dead

I flew to Nashville on Friday, to attend a surprise birthday party for my aunt Mary. I also got to spend some quality time with my friend Ted, who lives in Bowling Green Ky. Ted, who I will now start calling "my advisor", gave me a copy of Microsoft office for Mac that he got as an educator at WKU. I was tired since I'd been awake since 3:30 a.m., but I dragged myself to the Northwest gate at 7:30 a.m. yesterday, knowing that once I got there I would enjoy the pleasure of putting Word etc. on my new computer. I did. I thought. Then the poor thing went dark. Dead. Kaput. I chose not to panic, and instead read the Harriet Doerr book I'd brought. I figured that the computer would pull itself together by the time I got home.

It didn't. Instead it would not start up and gave me only a flashing question mark with no cues for what I should do.

I called AppleCare, and they told me to put one of the disks I got with the computer in, and I did. Apparently the harddrive is gone, so I have to send the little guy back to Mac, probably never to be seen again. Everything I had on that computer is probably gone, including email files, work for EDN (luckily I haven't been investing much time there lately!) and my iCalendar, which I have quickly come to rely on. Shite. Now I get the point of using .mac, which allows me to store files out on the internet instead of on a harddrive.

Mac is sending me a box to to return the computer in, probably on Wednesday. The repair is covered by the 1 year warranty, thank god. But, I do have to wait 5-7 business days before I see a Mac with a working hard drive again.