Right now Gary and Robert are in the living room laughing at me, because I’m positively giddy about having my computer back again! Let them laugh! This has been such an experience. I didn’t realize how much I enjoyed blogging, emailing, writing, researching, etc. until the day everything crashed and I just sat here looking at a “frozen” blue screen. My mind started racing. How much was saved on disk? How much had I written in the previous week that wasn’t on disk? What should I do? How long would it take to fix this? How much would it cost? I spent 40 minutes on the phone with Dell and nothing we tried worked.
I decided to take it to a computer shop on Saturday. Surprise! The shop that had previously cleaned and serviced it for me was no longer open on Saturdays. Nor were the other three shops in town. So we headed to the library, looked up some shops and chose one in Sherman, TX. I figured I could do without the computer for a week…pick it up the next Saturday. No big deal. Well, at the end of the week they informed me that they were “very busy” and hadn’t had time to get to my computer. Ugh! Okay, one more week wouldn’t hurt me. At the end of the week I called and a pleasant young man said, “Oh, thank goodness you called. I’ve been trying to reach you all week!” Well, he had the wrong phone number!!!! He wanted to tell me that the computer would need at least $150 worth of work and he needed my permission and one of my installation disks to complete the job. At that point I’d lost all confidence and told him I’d just pick it up on Saturday. Well, when I got there to pick it up he brought out the WRONG computer!! He was so embarrassed about all the mix-ups he didn’t even charge me the basic service rate.
On Monday I left work early so I could take the computer to the same guys that had worked on it before. They called a couple of days later and said they ran a virus scan, found something, and that seemed to be the end of the problem. Gary picked the computer up Thursday but I didn’t have time to hook it up. Friday I tried, but I was confused by two of the USB cables, so I decided to wait until Saturday and let my son hook it up.
Saturday came, cables all in place…computer would NOT work. I can’t even describe to you how disappointed I was. And frustrated because I don’t have enough technical knowledge to even know what to be angry about. Robert ran a virus scan and found a virus. Got rid of that and everything worked except the internet. He suggested I finish saving data before he tried anything else. I sat here for an hour and a half filling disks. We don’t have a CD burner or memory stick. ( I will be updating soon!!) He worked late into the night and still didn’t have any success.
We went to our friend’s anniversary party this afternoon and when we returned Robert had everything working!!!! He reinstalled software and rebooted stuff and did something with drivers that I don’t understand. I just know I have a brilliant son and I don’t know what I’m going to do when he moves to Arizona next month. I have a feeling there will be lots of long distance phone calls.
As my friend asked today, “When did we start relying on our children?” The answer is…when we started depending on machines that we don’t understand.
Have a great day! With any luck I’ll be posting again soon.
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