Black Screen of Death

Okay, you’ve prob’ly heard of the Blue Screen of Death, roight? Well, not only have I experienced the Blue Screen of Death (a few times), I have experienced the Green Screen of Death and I have seen (but not experienced, knock on wood) the Red Screen of Death. Knock on wood because I *think* that’s what you get when you are RIFed and the company cuts off your access. Harsh, eh?

I have experienced a couple more interesting failures including The Talking Moose is in the System Folder Again (yeah, again). That was on our Mac II Plus back in the day when you had to boot personal computers up with a floppy disk. Except this one day every time I put the boot disk into the slot, it would act like it was booting up for a while and then CRASH! After three or four sessions of this, I called the GG over at That Darn EPA. What the bloody hell is going on? Nonchalantly: “Oh, sounds like the Talking Moose is in the system folder again.” Whaaaaaa? And whaddya know, here is the Talking Moose (YouTube link)!

And then there was the Deep Shit Noise that happened when our *first* Apple laptop crashed. That laptop (in the pic) much predates modern Apple laptops but we still have it and I think it actually still works but not sure what you can really do with it. For a while I “watched” a couple of neighbor kids mornings before school. Folks, I am a GEEK and I am not GOOD at this kind of thing. Not a warm fuzzy baby-sitting type person at all but these were also friends of my kids, they were upper-el, and the mom was a good friend of mine. So they usually basically took care of themselves.

But one morning… I was struggling with the laptop (it was our only working computer at the time) and I couldn’t get it to boot up and then… it made the Deep Shit Noise (I can’t find that on YouTube, it must’ve been what *we* called it). I was flailing around trying to get it to work when a sibling fight broke out between my charges… Oh dear… I did beat the dern laptop into submission. I’m pretty sure I didn’t resolve the sibling fight. But I wasn’t accepting any pay for this gig and I would’ve gotten involved if the fight had escalated into violence, which it didn’t.

Today! I encountered the Black Screen of Death. Or so I thought. I faaaared up my laptop over at Cubelandia this morning and it sat there with a BLACK screen and a cursor in the middle of it for a FRICKIN’ HALF HOUR! I could see via a little flashing icon at the top of the keyboard that it was [maybe] noodling on something. But. Jeebus! I was pretty freaked out about this whole black screen thing but eventually my laptop booted up and I got the beauteous landscape scenery that Windows 10 provides. I hope I don’t get the black screen tomorrow.

And then there were the “bombs” that woke me up at 1:00-something last night. What the bloody hell was that? It wasn’t thunder and I don’t think it was fireworks although we *are* approaching the 4th of July. It wasn’t right outside my house but it didn’t seem all that far away. I was almost expecting to hear sirens but that never happened. I couldn’t find anything on mLive or next door neighbor this morning and I didn’t happen to connect with any neighbors this morning. Bob and Java were in the woods this afternoon but Becquet was with them and she is old enough now that I didn’t want to traumatize her by asking her dad if they had heard what I heard. Maybe it was just faaarworks. The neighborhood was certainly calm this morning.

One Response to “Black Screen of Death”

  1. Margaret Says:

    Hoping for no black screen of death for you tomorrow! I got one recently, hence my new laptop.