Photography And Half-Thoughts By Mitchell Hegman

...because some of it is pretty and some of it is not.

Monday, October 20, 2025

The Great Computer Crash of 2025

 My laptop computer did something extremely ungood. I had tethered my smartphone to the machine and was transferring a photograph from my phone when all hell broke loose. At once, everything on the screen began jostling back and forth rapidly. The open windows, icons, and folders on my desktop all distorted themselves into a constant blur. The Esc key didn’t work. Ctrl–Alt–Delete failed.

Finally, I resorted to jamming down the power button for several seconds, which forced a hard shutdown and instantly sucked the screen to black. After a mini-debate with myself, I poked the power button again to see if my machine would blossom back to normal operation.

Nope.

After the machine chased its tail for a minute or so, a message on the screen informed me it “couldn’t connect with the network.” I took a second run at rebooting and achieved the same result. Following that, I shut the laptop down for good.

This trouble makes perfect sense when you consider that my factory warranty recently expired. I’m on my own with this one and will be taking my machine to the computer shop today. At present, I’m writing this on my old laptop, which is limping a little and bumping into things as we proceed. But at least I’m not entirely dead in the water. I’m sharing a photograph of the message I got on the screen of my broken laptop.

The Message on My Computer Screen

—Mitchell Hegman

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