Griping and complaining.

I had to laugh at a phrase from the book mentioned below about what we would do if we knew we had only 30 days to live. The author says that he would find very few people who would choose to watch TV reruns or reformat their computer. Little did I know that I would be doing the latter the very next day - my work computer, that is.

I've been complaining to anyone who would listen for the last six months that it is muttering and growling and sighing like it's ready to give up. One way it's protested is for the screen to suddenly freeze and show me a black-and-green striped screen that I can only get rid of by turning the power off and on. And my favorite is that it randomly reboots itself. That's always a thrill when you've spent half an hour perfecting a 4-page report, and poof! it's just gone. Luckily if I work fast enough and pull enough strings, I can get it back, but it's still aggravating.

So Monday morning, I faced only a black screen. I finally got a blue one, but that's as far as it would go. I knew what would happen when I called the tech people. They had been around inside this computer remotely at least 5 times in the past 6 months and found nothing. So now that it was dead, they could do what they love to do - reformat. It's so easy for them, one click of a button (actually they made me pull the trigger), but it wipes out months of hard work and organizing on my part, all the best web sites in my favorites. I know I should save everything, but there's no disk drive on these old computers, and I keep forgetting to get an external drive.

I suggested it might be a hardware problem and that I might need a replacement computer, but he said that since I was getting as far as a Windows screen, it must be software. After 4 hours of setting up stuff and things not working and my having to call the cable company for my password and doing this and doing that, it was finally done. And 2 minutes after we finished, the screen turned black, and it rebooted. It did that 3 more times during the afternoon.

I cried on my supervisor's shoulder - she has heard me complain for 6 months - and 10 minutes later I got an email, "New computer is on the way!"

Good-bye, old dinosaur, you'll never make my life miserable again.


So that's good, but there is so much work to do putting all the information that I lost back in, all the email addresses, all the instant message addresses, and adding back the 10,000 lost shortcuts I had created. The one good thing is that the 300 emails that had piled up are now gone, and we'll see how important they were, I guess.

On a happy note, while all this was going on, Alex and co-worker were building me a nice new gate, one that swings and latches and even locks instead of sagging and scraping and pretty much falling down. I've been too stressed to take pictures, but I will take one tomorrow. All I need now are some nice pots of spring flowers to dress it up.

Debby and I did have a good time together last week - a trip to Ft. Walton where we met another cousin Bobby - and just lots of good relaxing reading and talking time. I actually watched TV and surprised myself by not even opening my needlework bag.

So it's the usual ups and downs of life but certainly more ups than downs, including an nice loud thunderstorm tonight and a good book to read. I'm surprised that I like it - a spy book! - Pursuit of Honor by Vince Flynn. I just wish someone would tell me on the first page who the good guys are and who the bad ones are because they keep changing from chapter to chapter, and I get a little confused. I bought books at Books-A-Million, Debby bought books, and I have a stack of library books. Now I just need the time to read them all.