Being in the house as much as I’ve been lately has been rough enough as is, but a recent event reminded me of how fragile my situation really is.  These days I’m pretty much exclusively relying on my PC to do everything for me.  It’s my media center, my social platform, my gaming station and the place where I do my homework.  A few days ago the power went out for a moment and took my computer down with it, leading me to have a minor crisis that I eventually emerged from.

After the computer booted back up, I noticed that only one of my monitors was being utilized, and at a low resolution as well.  I immediately jumped to the worst case scenario of, “everything is gone, my GPU is fried, I’m going to fail my class…” and so on and so forth.  It was this moment of terror that reminded me just how dependent I am on my computer these days.

After re-seating the GPU, unplugging and plugging everything in, and doing a wee bit of cable management that I’m not proud of, my computer came to life.  The GPU was working again, and I was able to breathe a sigh of relief.  Except that one of my monitors was still not working, an issue that was soon to be revealed as, “you didn’t plug the HDMI cable in all the way” syndrome.

This may sound like a big fuss over what turned out to be nothing, but it was genuinely terrifying to be confronted with the reality that this one thing in my home is my only outlet.  Sure I have a phone, but it’s hardly the same experience and it’s incapable of doing certain things I need to do, like doing online assignments.

I guess it was just another reminder that if something goes bad in my home, I have no way of fixing that situation right now.  I would literally be stranded without anything to help me get through these miserable days.  It’s all small potatoes in comparison to what’s really going on in the world, but it’s the thing that’s enabling me to stay home and stay safe while the people who are actually holding the world together right now, can keep us afloat.