Genius Bar, Revisited

Last week I pressed the power button on my computer and found a flashing white file folder with a question mark, accompanied by a persistent clicking sound from the bottom right of the keyboard. Two days later, I was back in the white glass room, talking to Brian about my options. He was very calm and professional as he asked me which files I'd like to save. Which pictures, songs, stories, papers? I watched his mouth move and felt a familiar tightening in the back of my throat. I was about to cry over my hard drive.

I wondered how often he'd been cried to. He must have delivered oodles of death sentences in his career as a Genius. But my tears are shy, so I said this instead:

"I'm having a really emotional response to the failure of my computer hardware. It's annoying." He looked at me for the first time since I'd sat down on that modern-chic stool. His eyes were true blue, and he had freckles.
"Yeah, I mean it's all your stuff," he replied. "Do you have it backed up?"
"Not really," I said. "Not unless my memory counts."

It didn't. Somewhere in the course of the last three years, I'd begun to trust all my intellectual property to a dirty, white machine. Only to see it appraised in five minutes by an ultra-hip techie with a logo on a lanyard.