I recently got a new one-terrabyte external hard drive. I already have one, and my computer’s hard drive is already that size, so I now have three terrabytes of disk space. It will never be enough.
After discovering that, for some reason, my computer was not really recognizing that this new external was connected to it, I decided to hold off for a week until a friend of mine could come and visit and I could ask him to take a look at it.
It’s not that I’m not computer-savvy. I am. My formal computer education was very basic-level computer education in elementary school (my favorite part of which was playing The Logical Journey Of The Zoombinis). This was in the nineties. I then had a typing class in seventh grade, which was helpful . . . although, to be honest, my typing became a lot faster in eighth grade when I started using instant messenger and also began doing my non-school writing on the computer. But, like many Millennials, particularly those of us born in the eighties (in my case, the late eighties), most of my knowledge of computers is self-taught. I consider myself competent with computers. I can hook them up, open them up to clean them, find files, etc. In some circles, I would be considered computer-illiterate, as I am not, say, a programmer. Compared to my mother, who, when she last had me look at her laptop, had two recycling bin icons on her very cluttered desktop, I am one of those unrealistically competent hackers in movies and on television* who can access anything on any computer.
Why did I wait to have my friend look at it before I did? Because he knows more about computers than I do. I’m not ignorant about them, but he is more likely to know something than I am. Instead of solving this particular problem for myself, which would have taken maybe fifteen minutes of trial-and-error (the solution being very simple), I waited a week for a friend of mine to look at it because I just felt …
