The Colby Echo

Issue date: 4/23/08 Section: Opinions

Jennifer Cox

I knew it was time for a day "unplugged" when I found myself close to tears in front of the Geek Squad. As I sat in front of the Augusta Best Buy's technician team with two broken computers (one with a mangled screen, the other brand new but barely functioning) and watched them try in vain to get one of them to work, I couldn't stop panic from sparking up in my chest. My life-my music, my pictures, my memories-was trapped inside those computers. Every single thing I had due and had done in the past couple weeks was stored in files hidden beneath the cryptic, tangled Windows maze, and the thought of having to rewrite three weeks of work was unbearable. I pretended to be on the phone so I didn't completely humiliate myself in front of Brian and Curly, but then my phone died on me and I could hardly breathe. I figured it might be a convenient time to learn how to.

An assignment for my fiction class asked me to spend a day unplugged, away from the technology that I've become so strongly fused to. I had been dreading this experience, putting it off as long as I could and failing to pencil it into my calendar. As much as anyone I know, I depend on electronics. I name my computers the way musicians name their instruments. I sleep with my computer and my cell phone right next to my bed, and I can't go half as fast on a run if my iPod isn't charged. But perhaps my machine s know me better than I think, and decided to rip me out of the wall. Deus ex machina.

With a dead phone in my pocket and the computers in the clutches of the Geek Squad, I marched into Pet Smart and looked for a friend. For aesthetic reasons, dorm legality reasons, and for pure practicality, I tore myself away from the hamster and gecko tanks and headed toward the fish. Half-an hour later, I found myself with a betta-fish-friendly tank (complete with neon orange pebbles and a fake plastic tree), a small container of fish food, and a small crimson fish-who would later be named Luke Skywalker-with a grumpy face and flowing fins. I got my computers back, still unfixed, and spent the ride home with the computers in the backseat, the tiny fish in the front.

Luke was at my mercy in a small cup of blue water in the cup holder, so I controlled the car and made it glide as I drove the twenty-seven miles to Waterville. I was worried about it especially as I drove over the bumpy grooves of Mayflower Hill, and even planned him a burial at the pond in my head (just in case the worst were yet to occur). Luckily, he made it up to my room and into his new tank. At the risk of sounding cliché, the serenity of Luke swimming about in his tank, aimlessly and disconnected from literally everything, made me realize I should spend the rest of the day unplugged. And thus began the assignment.

Continued...

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