My Kindle Fire temporarily died last night, reminding me that our relationship with technology is a close, and probably unhealthy, one. I was reading PDFs for work while helping Kate prepare dinner, and at some point, it decided to go from showing me Lee and Kirby’s early Fantastic Four to showing me a giant question mark and a message that announced that the Kindle couldn’t boot and maybe I should restore everything to factory settings.
My response to this latter message was to start lying to myself, internally comforting my worries by thinking things like “It’s okay, I can just restore the Kindle and don’t really need all the information that’s on there, it’ll be a hassle to add all the passwords and everything, but no big deal” over and over again, instead of the more honest oh God this is a disaster, I love my Kindle, please don’t die on me Kindle please don’t. Perhaps the deity of personal tech heard the latter, more true, monologue, because despite what the screen said, the Kindle eventually rebooted and worked fine, all by itself. Consider it a near-death experience that makes me think that I should really consider backing up data more often.