A Hard but Fair Life

My iPod, my phone, my remote—they know I run a hard but fair household. No unnecessary cruelty, no throwing things across the room, no acts of revenge. In return they perform reliably and without drama. It’s an arrangement that works.

Then someone issued a challenge: open every program on your machine simultaneously, photograph the carnage, pass the damage along. A blog meme, essentially, designed to discover how much your computer would absorb before it broke down entirely.

My Mac Mini G4 took it without much complaint, which surprised me more than the task itself did. Desktop buried in windows, every application fighting for space, the dock a chaos of bouncing icons—and the machine just got on with it. Quietly, stoically, without a single dramatic crash. There’s something almost admirable about that. More composed under pressure than most people I know.