STANDBY

Control panel. Energy save settings. Standby after… I don’t know how much time it takes before one stops being active and just switches to standby.

Being in standby is not being shut down. It is almost like that: there is the same difference there is between sleeping and being dead. There is a spark of life in the standby state, a regular breath, which is simply given by that small light (green, blue, orange…) that flashes on the edge of the computer. Yes, there is life even in a standby state. Weak, intermittent, faint but always life. Of course it is not as good as being running fast and productively with a multiple Giga byte RAM. Of course it is not as good as being luminous, multi-tasking, busy, busy, busy… so damn busy… When you are on standby you just do one thing: you stay there.

What happens sometime is that somebody comes and turns you on again and suddenly you’re back to your luminous, multi-tasking, busy, busy, busy, so damn busy state. Maybe you’ll be working differently from the previous session but you’re back to activity and that’s all that matters. God, how you have been waiting to be turned on again by that finger! You have been there, intermittently intermitting your existence waiting for that finger to press the right button because, if it is the right finger, it knows where it has to put pressure.

When you are in standby you always think the right finger will come and press your key to life. Sometimes disenchantment brings you to wait just for a decent finger and not for the right one. Better than nothing is the overall compromise of new millennium. When you are in standby you have one main thought running in your head: if you had to be shut down you would be down in first place. You think: it is cruel to put you in standby, leave you there waiting and then die. Just cruel. Sometimes it happens, though, and it does happen more often than necessary. It happens just because of an absent-minded attitude or more likely because most of the times people don’t know what they will do with you: they put you in standby and wait to see what happens, if they can take a decision, make their mind instead of just being there, scratching their heads with their nails. Rarely it happens that people put you on standby because they need to get away from a second, they admit that, they leave you there but they know they will be back with a decision. The sad truth is that what happen is that nobody switches you to standby: you just switch yourself to that state because people often just go away and leave you there while you’re still way too active. You keep staying active for a while –as I said, I don’t know exactly how much, I guess it depends on people-, then you roll your eyes around to see if there is anybody around, then you go on standby and wait. First you think it is just a natural pause –everybody needs to break from time to time-, then you start feeling useless, then you go on standby even before realizing it. I wonder if in the moment right before shutting down we said some kind of little prayer like we do just before dying. Our own kind of prayer… something that sounds like Please, hold on just a little bit longer… Please. Maybe the right finger will be back. Maybe.

Control panel. Energy save settings. Standby after the time you need to understand they have gone. Shut down as soon as you realize they won’t be back. The quickest, the safest for the whole system. It is the iron law of energy saving. And of human relations.