Harriet Blakely has a hard time letting things go, which is why it was especially traumatic when her Safari browser suddenly quit, taking with it window tabs that she’d kept open for more than half her life.
“It’s remarkable the tabs lasted as long as they did,” commented Kyle, Harriet’s boyfriend of four years. “Those tabs were her longest relationship.”
Not many people can claim such a demonstrated level of consistency and loyalty. But Harriet operates in a league of her own: until this unfortunate incident, she still had a tab open for a dress that’s been out of stock since Obama was in office.
The first tab that ever became a permanent fixture in Harriet’s life was a list of all the states where it’s illegal to own pet turtles, that she found when she was 14. “My dad was allergic to cats and dogs, so I was deep in the research phase for other options,” she explains. “It became a nifty little list that I assumed I’d need to reference again at some point.”
Though she never quite needed the list again (her family got a pet bird), Harriet found that she liked keeping the tab open, just in case. Once glancing at the tab became integrated into her routine, it provided a sense of comfort and consistency. More tabs shortly followed.
Over the years, Harriet’s beloved tabs included: a symptom list for polycystic ovary syndrome, apartment listings in 6 different cities, 4 separate tabs of her Pinterest homepage, the Wikipedia page for Yugoslavia, MySpace, the admissions page for a boarding school she never attended, the now-defunct Delia’s website, and eBay. Her computer finally reached its breaking point when Harriet opened one final tab—a recipe for paleo brownies. But she never got a chance to read what the sugar and flour substitutes would be for that particular dessert. Instead, Safari crashed. It went out cold.
Harriet expects to recover from this event in due time, but right now, she describes it as “still sort of raw.” To take her mind off the loss, Harriet quickly downloaded Chrome. And from the looks of it, a new computer is in her future—she already has
ten tabs open with different laptop models.
“I need to make sure this never happens again,” said Harriet, toggling between tabs to compare the computers’ RAM speeds.
