The Tortoise vs. the Bolt of Lightning

It's electric. Boogie woogie woogie.

Source: The Electric Slide. Of course, this wording is also appropriate in the middle of a major thunderstorm...

Explanation: At the time I wrote this status, we were in the middle of an impressive thunderstorm. Where I live, the storms usually come across Philadelphia first, and all morning I was listening to the radio DJs talk about how scary this thunderstorm was. Sure enough, at around 8:15am, it started to get dark outside.

As it became more and more clear that we were going to be pounded by the storm, I decided to shut down my home desktop machine so I could unplug it. I've heard too many examples of machines getting fried during lightning storms and this was clearly going to be a biggie. So, I shut down my machine.

I should mention that I bought my machine in summer of 2005, which means it's about 4 years old. That makes it a senior citizen as far as computers go, and it shows, especially during startup and shutdown. Where the machine used to take a minute, it now takes five, or sometimes ten.

When I say "I shut down my machine" what I mean is that I clicked "Shut Down" in Windows. From there, picture the scene in Office Space where Peter is trying to get out of the office before Lumberg asks him to come in on the weekend... only instead of 30 seconds, it took 10 minutes. Every time I thought the machine was almost ready to shut down, another dialog popped up telling me that it was unable to close an application. Meanwhile, the weather radar looked like this:


Lightning is flashing every five seconds or so, Auntie Em is already in the storm cellar, and my freakin' computer won't finish shutting down.

Eventually I got the machine turned off and unplugged, but by that point it was sunny outside and the neighbors were all out surveying the damage. In the future I think I'll have to consult the local weather and shut it down the night before... or I can replace my desktop with a laptop. I'll have to think about that.