As some of you might know, I have a little anger management issue. You may remember such episodes as:

Anyways, so the 4-year old family computer that I hand-built started to act up over the past few days. It gets slow, freezes and is generally a pain to use. I decided to do some housekeeping by uninstalling crap and deleting files. In the process though, I accidentally deleted a series of recipes that my mom has been writing for us to keep in posterity.

It shows how important the recipes were to me that I immediately tensed up. At first I was angry at myself for being careless, then I was angry at the computer for making me delete stuff which I wouldn’t normally do. Yeah I was getting pissed off by an inanimate object which up till now has brought joy and entertainment to my folks and my brother.

My fists clenched up and thoughts of smashing parts of the computer to pieces ran through my head quickly. I managed to control the physical urge but I couldn’t control my mouth as I let out a long and loud stream of expletives in two languages.

Mom came running into the room and said, “What’s wrong?” I explained what happened and she being the better Buddhist that I’m constantly trying to be, said that it’s only 5 recipes so far – she can rewrite them.

Guy about to leap onto a keyboard
Fenchurch! @ flickr
Still fuming at me, myself and everything, I immediately went to Dell’s site and ordered a new computer. $1078 later, I began to feel better. Now I understand why some women shop to make themselves feel better. In the end, my folks get a new computer with a nice big 22″ screen and the recipes will be re-written. So all’s well ends well eh?

Well, a day later the hard disk died. So in hindsight, there’s no difference between my accident and what would have happened anyway. Except now my dad’s and my brother’s data are lost too. Luckily though, it’s nothing that couldn’t be replaced.

The universe and all that, karmic? I do backups for my own stuff but not for the family computer. If I did, I wouldn’t have had a reason to lose it. Sometimes I resent the fact that I’m the IT guy even when I’m not at work. But lesson learnt though – backing up the family computer is not only good sense, it’s good for my fragile temper too.

Serenity now!