Colonel Panic Strikes

Everything I touch I destroy.

Here I am, home for the weekend in scenic Twinsburg, Ohio, trying to relax and enjoy myself. So I do what I usually do before I go to bed: I listen to a nice smoothing podcast on my Macbook Pro and look up information on baseball players via Wikipedia (yes, I am that big of a nerd). Problem is, my Macbook is getting antsy becaue it hasn't updated itself in quite some time. So the annoying little system update screen pops up and begins yelling "Update me!!! Please udate me!!!"

"Fair enough, Macbook," I say, "I rarely update you and you seemed to have earned it." So I click the little update button and go on my merry baseball-researching way. Of course, merely pressing the button is not enough for Macbook. I forgot that Macbook always wants to restart in order to update. So I mournfully close out my iTunes and my Safari browser and let Macbook do its thing.

But I am not a patient man. And as I watch the progress monitor slowly crawl to 10% after about 10 minutes, I decide to abort this tedious process. So, like the idiot I am, I turn the laptop off, assuming that I can just resume the update process when I am ready to go to bed. I then turn on the Macbook.

And my heart breaks.

I have been Colonel Panicked. The correct term for what is actually happening to my precious laptop is technically Kernel Panic Mode, but I prefer the phoenetic pronunciation of "Colonel Panic". To me it suggests that there is an angry Army Official inside of my computer named "Colonel Panic" that is wreaking havoc with the machine's guts. After about 57,290 attempts to reboot my Mac, only to see the same damn Colonel Panic message every time, I called my girlfriend to ask fo help. She did some research on her own "Panic" free laptop and found out that Kernel Panic Mode is essentially a cancer that inflicts Mac operating systems from time to time. I knew I was in trouble when I looked at the "Kernel Panic" Wikipedia entry this morning and Wikipedia obliged me to see its "Screens of Death" page as well. There is nothing that I can do to fix my poor little Macbook Pro, I have to take it to the nearest Apple store and beg Steve Jobs's slaves for some help.

Why, Colonel Panic, did you have to come in the night for my Mac's soul? I needed that freaking computer! Everything I have written for the past year is in that hard-drive and all the websites I need for my Sunday Morning Links is in there as well. Take my eyes, my hands and my feet but don't take my laptop away from me!

I would drive the 20 to 30 minutes to the Apple store in my area and find some help, but in two hours I get to head up to C-Town (that's Cleveland, to you out-of-towners) and watch my little brother's band play at the House of Blues for Battle of the Bands. They are called Saints and Poets (a name developed by yours truly) and they will own your soul if you ever cross their path. It is a small concession that I will be able to eat and enjoy good live music a few hours from but I have to take what I can get when Colonel Panic systematically tries to destroy my life.

Thankfully, my family someone has a total of 4 computers in this house (counting my laptop). I have no idea why we need 4 computers fo 3 people,, but I think it shows you where our priority lies...especially when you consider we only have two working TVs. I would actually say that for every hour of TV I watch in my life, I spend another three hours on a computer.

So Colonel Panic definitely hit me where it hurts. Hopefully, next time you hear from me I will be typing from my Mac. If not, may God have mercy on my soul.

Actually, may Colonel Panic have mercy on my soul.