The Day the Hardware Gave Up First
What it feels like when everything hits at once
Today was one of those days where the universe seemed determined to communicate something, and it chose the language of broken hardware.
It started last night, when my work laptop refused to charge. I tried every cable in the house, every outlet, every trick I have learned. Nothing. I decided to walk away and deal with it in the morning, which is usually the right call, but the morning did not bring any miracles. At the office, it still would not charge. I grabbed a thumb drive to rescue my work in progress, hoping I could at least salvage the day. That hope did not last long.
I found a spare machine to reimage, copied my files, and told myself that in a few hours I would be back on track. I even let myself be talked into setting up the new device I have been ignoring for weeks. Then I moved it wrong, snapped the charger, and watched the whole situation tilt from “annoying” to “you have got to be kidding me”. The new laptop would not recognize my YubiKey. My patience evaporated. I was one error message away from throwing every piece of hardware through the nearest window.
So I retreated to my old Secure Access Workstation, the digital equivalent of crawling back to a familiar blanket, and tried to get something done. By then it was noon. The database rebuild I had kicked off yesterday was nowhere near where I wanted it to be. And underneath all of it, I could feel something else rising. Not frustration. Not even anger. Something heavier.
Because the truth is, today was not about the laptops.
Yesterday my oldest daughter was accepted to a second school outside the United States. My younger daughter passed her driver’s test and registered for her fall housing with two roommates. My kids are stepping into their futures with a kind of momentum that is beautiful and bittersweet.
And in a few days, I am going to get an offer that will force a decision I have been circling. Am I retiring.
I keep telling myself I should feel grateful, that after a long career I might get to choose my exit instead of being shoved out by a layoff. But gratitude is not the only emotion in the room. There is grief. There is fear. There is the quiet ache of realizing that the work I have done for decades, the puzzles I have solved, the systems I have built, the identity I have carried, all of it is suddenly finite in a way it was not before.
I know people who are 47 with 23 years at Microsoft and eligible for voluntary retirement. I cannot imagine how they are feeling. I am older, closer to the age where this decision has been looming for a while, and it still feels awful. I keep thinking I should be handling it better. I keep thinking I should be more philosophical. But today, all I wanted to do was sit in my car and cry. It has been a long time since I have done that.
And yet, because life is never just one thing, I did get the database rebuilt. I fixed the dashboard. I refined my storage blob replay tool. I made progress on the new laptop. I even made it to my errand before the store closed, with five minutes to spare.
But the whole day, I kept feeling like I was counting something. Counting how many more times I will get to do this work. How many more puzzles I will get to solve. How many more days I will get to feel like myself in this particular way.
How do you walk away from something that shaped you without falling apart.
I do not have the answer yet. But today, the hardware gave up first. And maybe that is its own kind of message, that sometimes things break not because you are failing, but because you are standing at the edge of a life that is about to change.
Alison + Marlowe