I have only had two accidents with cars in my life. The first one completely totaled my beautiful 1965 Mustang; it was not driveable after that, and got sold for scrap. The second one was actually a minor car versus deer situation: a deer came up out of a field, side-swiped my Dodge Neon, and then sprung back into the corn. The car was driveable, and in fact only had minor damage – a hoof print in the back door and a battered rear-view mirror. But after that accident, the car didn’t feel right to me for a long time. I felt like it drove different, but not in a way that I could identify or get checked out. It went for several more years (until I sold it to a young friend who, if I understand correctly, did significantly more damage to it – Hi, Ben Jordan!), so it was clearly fine. But it felt tainted.
I’m having that same feeling at this very moment. Sitting at my laptop keyboard. My system froze up in a mysterious and unresolvable way last weekend, and eventually the Geeks told me that there was nothing left to do but collect my data in Safe Mode and do a complete restore – wipe the drive and start fresh. Which is all well and good…the system started up again, which was an improvement, and everything seems to be re-loading without incident. But what is with the check-boxes next to all the file folders and files when I go looking for something? That wasn’t part of my Windows 7 experience before, and I don’t want it to be now, but there it is. Everything’s fine, I guess; it just feels…different.
Brandon Woosley 