Dick Dastardly Ate My Hard Drive . . .

I’ve been feeling ill today. Actually I’ve been feeling ill for two weeks now. The worst thing is the time honoured tradition that all men have of classifying feeling sorry for yourself as one of the worst but somehow truly deserved symptoms.

Today, it kept me off work. Today my MA began. Today my favourite Lacie (now owned by brand BeckhamTM )external firewire Hard drive died. That’s 3 things. Unable to see properly, unable to breathe regularly and unable to stand on my feet for more than a few minutes at a time I added panic to my list of symptoms as somewhere in the bowl of ready brek ® that my brain had become i could see a strip of punched tape that said – you have 3 things to think about.

I dealt with this all by trying to find someone or something to blame. I had my suspicions. These were heightened when I logged onto the MA home page and saw 3 posts added – count them, 3.

I suddenly felt like I was ten again. The house would be totally quiet (isn’t it amazing how the old victorian house with holes in it you lived in when you were really poor as a kid was so much quieter than the house you now live in as a pillar of the community?) since my parents would be at work and my brothers and sisters would just stay in bed. Saturdays I would come down to the living room and turn on the black and white t.v. set to see Swap Shop with a pre Deal or No Deal Noel Edmunds. The tv set itself was a peculiarity. My dad would always go the local Rumbelows to buy an ex rental TV which we would then carry home between us. How weird that everyone in our world (ie within 3 miles of our house) knew the name Rumbelows and also where the shop was – even if they’d never had any contact with the company. We all just knew. Our communities passed down knowledge via the spoken word like some ancient native American tribes. Anyhow, The TV® would weigh around 1 tonne with the remote weighing in at a further 2. Oh, but Swap Shop! How amazing was this mash up of cartoons, swaps, programmes, phone chat, pop and films. We even thought Cheggers was cool – although some of us had the nascent beginnings of an idea that this man may be what adults sometimes referred to as a buffoon.

Anyway, Noel (www.noel.com) would speak to someone on the phone and then say something like “We’ll be right back after Wacky Races”. Then some kind of weird magic happened where real people (albeit with hair that later on I would realise contravened not only the geneva convention but also the general theory of relativity) stopped and these cartoon people started. That was the thrill. Trying to work out how it was done. Boffins. I didn’t know what the word meant but I’d read it in a few Enid Blyton novels and figured it had something to do with smart people. Years later I would have another life changing experience when I found out that television also came in colour – I was like Neo:

neo: “what’s wrong with my eyes?”

morpheus: “You’ve never used them before”

But hell, here they were Dastardly, Muttley, Penelope, the lot. I loved Wacky Races. The fact that I so enjoyed a cartoon about sabotaging other’s people’s cars in order to cheat to win a race is a little disquieting. But god, it was funny. I loved the cars. I loved the characters. I couldn’t wait to grow up and do it for real! Having been brought up in a very strict first generation Asian(asian indian, asian pakistani, asian chinese, asian japanese, asian other, none of the above) home I knew it was wrong to sabotage someone else’s chances and I knew it was wrong to cheat in any kind of competition. But god I loved it. I never really wanted Dick Dastardly to win but deep down I watched and watched to get to the bit where good old Muttley would do his trademark (TM) laugh. Every week Dick would do something to one car and when the starting gun went off there would be one car left at the start with its wheels rolling down the road and its occupants choking in the fog of the other cars now a mile ahead of them. I always kinda felt sorry for them. They never ever won – and they never figured out it was the stereotypically evil looking guy whodunnit.

Then Noel would be back and another week would separate me from Dick’s next dastardly plan.

As I logged on today there I was. Ten years old and on the starting line with all the other Wacky Racers. That’s when my beloved Lacie gave up the ghost. Right then and there. It was my favourite drive. And because it was my favourite drive I bestowed upon it a strange and utterly baseless aura of somehow being better, faster and more reliable than any of my other drives. I never backed it up. To my shame I never backed it up.

But this was my favourite drive. We’d been through good times and bad together and no way would it be so selfish as to let me down like this. I suspected sabotage. Foul play of the dirtiest kind. Foul play of the kind that only a cliched villain clad in black with a twirly mustache would dare to do. This villain had taken his wrench (having tied yet another helpless maiden to a railway track and rubbed his hands together – presumably from the rope burns) and sabotaged my drive. Sabotaged my chances!

So right now, I’m using some FBI (a subsiduary of News International) software to analyse the photos of everyone on the course in my quest to find that twirly moustache.

I know the truth (TM) now. One of you is none other than Dick Dastardly. And you ate my hard drive. You and your dog.

Or it could just all be this rather delightful medication . . .