Now is the summer of our disconnect.

In truth, it's not now anymore because the disconnectivity is over, thankfully, and the period of duration was really only about a day and a half anyway. But it seemed much longer, and it did occur this week, which is still summer except in places like South Africa where my friend is visiting.

You see, our home laptop caught some horrible disfiguring RAM-eating virus and crashed, rendering my spouse and me temporarily disengaged from the world as we know it. And when I say the computer crashed, I don't mean a crash on the level of a mild afternoon sugar crash that occurs about 45 minutes after eating two Three Musketeers bars. Or the kind that involves stocks plummeting and brokers having breakdowns. Or even the metal-crunching, machinery-wrenching sort of disaster of a locomotive versus an abandoned car on a railroad crossing.

No, I'm talking a crash on a cosmic, quantum-physical, astronomical scale with subatomic particles smashing into each other in some kind of cyber fusion reaction in which a small Big Bang likely has occurred deep down on the molecular level in the hard drive, softening it and creating a new parallel universe and leaving us to worry about evil reverse copies of ourselves sliding over into this world and making trouble.

If you see Spock sporting a goatee and tooling around in one of those cute little race cars from "Tron," give him a wide berth.

The

dark side

Let's just say it was bad, and it makes one realize -- unless you live with your head and accompanying data in The Cloud -- it's necessary to have more than one electronic device these days just to check your e-mail and remain part of civilized society. We were fortunate enough to have recently received the gift of an iPad from our dear Iowan relatives, so at least we could get to our bank accounts to see if we could afford a new computer. Even so, I kept going over to the lifeless laptop and just sitting near it, as if my presence might evoke some hint of recovery. Clearly its "do not resuscitate" orders were in effect.

Once again, such an incident fills me with trepidation as to our dependency on such devices, a theme that will be explored in the very Hunger Games-ish/post-apocalyptic new TV show coming out this fall called "Revolution." On the show, all the worldwide power grids fail, lights go out, cars don't work, you can't plug in your iPhone charger (well you can but it won't help) and life comes to a halt -- just like it did in India a couple of weeks ago when their grids died, plunging more people into darkness than the population of the United States and Canada combined. Combined! That's a huge deal! Yet to most of us smug, overconfident it'll-never-happen-to-us Americans, it was a mere blip on our Google news feeds.

Payback

When my personal laptop-crash/formation-of-a-new-universe event first occurred, I rushed the computer to the ER of our IT guru at my office. He muffled a chuckle, because our laptop is more than five years old, which is about a million in technology years. But I defended it. After all, it has served us well. And it was free.

That's right. Now this is a secret, so don't tell anybody. But way back in the Paleozoic period, we bought it online from a well-known computer company using an equally well-known Internet payment-facilitating service which, for security reasons we'll just call Allocation Friend, which, for some still-unexplained reason, put the money BACK IN our account about a week after the purchase. Right away I contacted folks at Friend, who insisted the bill was paid. I contacted people at the computer company itself, who insisted the bill was paid. This same series of insistent conversations took place several times as I kept checking for months. I mean, I tried to pay! I wanted to pay! I'm sure some time in 2031 it will pop up on my credit report and Spock with a goatee will darken my doorstep, likely accompanied by the Gorn and that malevolent gaseous creature from "Star Trek," original series, Episode 42.

Alas, RIP free computer. I placed a small Halloween skull on top of it to mark its demise. In record time, my husband hunted and gathered a new laptop for us. It's beautiful and shiny and new, but it has a 10-key number pad on the right hand side, which shifts the letters on the keyboard over ever so slightly to the left. This is a traumatic transition for me. Sure, I'll get used to it, but if you see typos in this column, it's because I'm off a key or two, and when I mean to type "Star Trek," which I so often do, it will likely come out "Dyst Ytrl," and many will think I'm writing in code or Klingon or Gorn. Of course some (Jeff) might prefer I write everything that way and spare them the agony of my purple prose to begin with.

At least we're connected again, and looking forward to a winter of glorious connectivity. Sy ;rsdy imyo; yjr mrcy Noh Nsmh. Woops, I mean ... at least until the next Big Bang.