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| “I know my way around a hard drive,” I told her, a little immodestly. “I’m not afraid to take the case off and fiddle with the modem or the com port. And I never read the instruction manuals that come with software. I’d rather just figure it out myself.” | |
| It must have been the right answer. We talked about our families, our busy lives in Miami, and then we agreed to meet
at a café on Lincoln Road in South Beach. There, under the soft lights, we talked more about ourselves. She had a large cast of characters in her life, and a Dilbert situation at work-- the usual tangle of petty jealousies and office infighting-- all of which I tried to keep straight. But I had a hard time paying attention. The problem was her eyes: They were simply beautiful, mesmerizing, coy-- maybe holding a secret. I found I couldn’t keep from smiling when I looked at her. Somehow the conversation settled on computers. She seemed fascinated by them. She wanted to hear about hardware malfunctions and software bugs. She teased me that if we dated, my computer might be jealous. Then she mentioned, quite casually, almost an afterthought: “I have a laptop. But I’m not sure it even works.” “I can take a look at it for you,” I volunteered. “That would be nice.” Eventually, we spent a night together at her townhouse, a lovely place full of artwork and antiques. Kisses on the sofa led to lovemaking in the bedroom. At that particular moment, the last thing on my mind was computers. But as she lay beside me, slowly threading her fingers through the hair on my chest, she gazed at me with those mesmerizing eyes, and said softly, almost in a whisper, “Would you look at my laptop?” Next thing I knew I was out of her bed and perched on a hard stool in the kitchen. She brought the laptop out, and I plugged it in and watched as the liquid crystal screen came to life. It cycled through its memory check, and then displayed some bad news: “Hard disk not found.” “You’ve got a problem with your CMOS,” I said. “My sea moss?” “The hardware setup,” I said. “I can fix it.” My fingertips flew over the keyboard as she gazed worshipfully over my shoulder. “If you can fix my computer, I’ll love you forever,” she promised. It took a couple of tries to get the hardware configuration right. Finally, I got everything working, and I logged into Windows. A perfect repair. She kissed my cheek, taking my hand in hers. “Ready to go back to bed?” she asked. But I foolishly hesitated on the hard stool. “Let’s just check one last thing,” I said. I exited Windows and turned the computer off. Then I switched it on again. The screen illuminated the same old bad news: “Hard disk not found.” I went back into the CMOS and found that none of the settings I’d changed had been retained when I turned the power off. I tried it all once more. “Hard disk not found,” the computer hooted at me. “This is more than I can fix, “ I finally said. She looked sadly at the plastic case. “I thought it was dead anyway,” she said. “But there for a moment, watching you…” She shrugged. “Oh, well.” Then she yawned, and said those deadly words familiar to all who have mightily loved and pathetically lost: “Boy, it’s late. And I have to get up early.” I collected my clothes, and kissed her good night. “Next week is really busy for me,” she said. “I’ll call you.” When she hadn’t called by Saturday, I called her, and left a message on her machine. It took two more unanswered messages over the next two weeks to convince me I wouldn’t be seeing her again. I told my friend Steve all about it. He’s one of the few computer guys I know who had been able to work through the dating game to marriage. “I tried everything I could,” I said. “And it still didn’t work out.” “The battery had probably been drained so far it couldn’t come back,” he said. “Sometimes you just have to give them up.” I suppose he meant the laptop. Or something else I couldn’t compute. | |