Pinwheel of Death

My daughter’s computer went into “pinwheel of death" mode. Anyone with a Mac knows what that means. I’m pretty sure anyone with a computer has experienced that particular phenomenon (freezing up thing).

To say it was frustrating is putting it mildly. Especially since it happened at 7:10 am and we were supposed to leave the house at 7:15 am, or if not my oldest daughter would miss her bus, and then we would be thrown into panic mode to figure out a way to get everyone to school on time. And of course the paper my daughter wrote last night had to be turned in that day (the one she supposedly emailed me to print last night, which of course never made it to my inbox, and was currently stuck in pinwheel hell).

I decided I should remain calm since I was the adult in the room. Panic set in as I watched my daughter freak out. I was feeling helpless but somehow managed to remain calm.

In my efforts to stay calm a whole conversation was flying through my brain, “Okay…we have 5 minutes. 5 minutes to make that seriously irritating pinwheel go away, open up the file, email it to my computer, get the printer warmed up and hope nothing gets lost in the transition from my computer to the printer. Oh, and do we have paper? What about the internet, is it working right now?”

Talking my daughter through the panic I started to sound like a flight attendant…”Remain calm…only the engines shut down….we can fly, oh, for a good 2 miles without any engines working”. But what about after that when the plane drops out of the sky? Are we dead?

As we attempted to “shut down” the culprit software that was fueling the pinwheel I saw tears well up in my daughter’s eyes. Halfway to our finish line my daughter brightened up and announced, ”Hey, I have the file on my USB! We can print it from there!”

I love it. My daughter is better at problem solving than me. I remember my own version of problem solving back in the dark ages from my childhood when our biggest challenge was negotiating who would get up to change the channel on our TV (remote controls weren’t invented yet). Times a changing, and thankfully all before 7:15 a.m.