My Own Personal Nurse Ratched

As I worked on my data sheet earlier today, I went to scroll from my audience and purpose section up to the date, due to some sort of panic attack that I typed the wrong date.  Apparently, my panic attack was too much for the computer to handle, because in my panic to scroll from the very bottom to the very top, my computer froze and I had to restart so that the machine would not fry.

This caused me to draw parallels between my life and Bromden's.  I feel like we both have some sort of extreme fear of machines, but is it truly irrational?  I don't know about anyone else, but, on average, I save my data sheet about every thirty seconds.  That may be irrational, because I can easily remember what I wrote thirty seconds ago, and if the computer were to crash, it would do an "auto-save" of my document.  But, I always have a nagging fear that my computer would lock down and keep my data sheet from me like Nurse Ratched kept toothpaste from McMurphy.  I even keep an updated version on my data sheet on a flash drive, even though I have no intention of working on it at school.  This, of course, is because I am afraid it will not save and I will have to start from the place I began previously (which has happened before).

It is my own Nurse Ratched because I fear it, yet am still a slave to it.  Not only in school, but I look to the internet for my connections to the outside world.  Just as the patients hate Nurse Ratched, they look to her for support and decision-making.  Maybe machines control our world after all, just like Bromden believes.