When I was much younger and learning about hardware engineering there was a fun game called, “Anthropomorphization and Personifications”. This was a name which I could barely say, but otherwise which most children would engage in while playing with toys or dolls, except I was playing it with the innards of a IBM 5150 while holding a screwdriver and attempting not o lose any screws.

In this game ​the graphics board, the massive hard drive, floppies, serial and parallel devices, etc.. they had people names and people jobs and they operated the machine when the power was turned on. In my imagination there were little figures going about their day to day, carrying data, pouring bits and bytes through the (cabling/interconnects) plumbing, talking to others, just living their lives. Many entertaining day dreams for a first through whatever grade elementary school aged brain.

Somewhere prior to adulthood I’d have certain “technical conflicts” with broken hardware, and sometimes that hardware needeed to be shown what happens if it doesn’t fulfill its design. Details are irrelevant, but one could imagine a teenage me watching Office Space and rather enjoying the printer scene out in a grass field… oh that resonnated so well, nearly like a re-enactment of my travels to construction sites to drop burnt-out cards or locked-up drives or other hardware from heights or find its otherwise ensured demise by force. After all, it was my moral duty to ensure that no one else could ever be harmed by that equipment ever again, to prevent others of naïveté and youthful innocence from ever having to feel what I had felt. Clearly those inclinations were about more than the broken hardware in my hands, those core components of a dysfunctional machine, but where and when my youth occurred there was no support or awareness of childhood trauma therapy, and parents could not be trusted to avoid the risk of either victim blaming or creating somehow worse problems. So as would be the common endurace, I would manage it myself, alone and in silence.

Someone, some adult, any of them, should have understood what was happening and helped. Perhaps I was too well practiced at remaining silent, guarded, self-reliant, subdued, secretive. Those are learned behaviors, and they are learned not from positive or healthy life events. Perhaps those adults looked into my large blue eyes, set against porcelain skin, rosy-red hued cheeks, and perhaps what they saw was a truth they refused to accept, and so the pleading gaze was brushed off with a common refrain, “you are SO cute! look at those blue eyes, who could say no?” Indeed, how could I have said no when no one listened? Instead, I learned to say nothing at all.

Well, several decades later and those thoughts and truths are most often in the background, perhaps occasionally at the periphery, rarely surfacing until an unrelated recounting of youth unfolds; in this case a story of anthropomorphism in hardware, almost entirely unrelated to trauma from all those years ago. Regardless, PTSD interjects on unmitigated impulse, disrupts dopamine response programming out of the blue, and tries to pull the mind right back to the events to be relived. All methods of prevention and response are temporary. Trauma never truly goes away, even on the best of days, it may only be lived with, coped against, endured.

Returning to the present, that game never really stopped, and when I take apart systems - occasionally ones costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars - there are still daydreams and wandering imaginations of similar anthropomorphic events, but certainly they exist in a much more futuristic landscape from the sci-fi retro-future. I no longer retire equipment with the same dedication or passion; or perhaps modern construction sites are simply not as accessible as they once were, their heights no longer able to be explored.