Valerie says I wasn’t built for the night shift. How little does she know!
About two o’clock yesterday afternoon, I gave up. I was trying to go online to look for wedding presents for my friends Tom and Christy. I clicked on the Bed Bath and Beyond link about 5 times and it never went through. My email was crashing every 10 minutes, and the last email I sent to Valerie went to her 13 separate times. I had something evil possessing my computer.
I knew what it was. It weren’t a virus, per se. It was that even new mutation they call “adware.” Personally, I can’t tell much functional difference between the two. It’s sort of like saying you’re a Japanese Shinto instead of a European Pagan. Both viruses and adware are evil little programs that fiddle with my computer when I don’t want them to. The only difference is that, for some reason, my Norton anti-virus protects me from one, but not the other.
I hear they’re taking steps to remedy that problem, but in the mean time, I have a computer that is worthless in a lot of ways. I can write whatever I want, but I can’t give it to anybody without hitting the “print” key.
So there was only one solution: I had to reformat and start anew.
I wasn’t really worried. I’m good at this. It’s actually pretty good for your computer, since it gets rid of all the stupid programs you’ve installed but since forgotten about. You just have to make sure you back up all the stuff you don’t intend to forget about.
I did all these things. Then I put the CD in the slot and restarted. The Windows installation screen came up… I told it to create a new directory, format, etc. It did all those things, and then started to install windows.
Then it stopped.
It gave a little error message that said “incorrect function” and then listed some obscure file deep within the bowels of the windows installation CD.
I repeated this process four times, to no avail. Then I started calling people. I called half of Valerie’s family (since half of them are computer techs anyway), and then I called home. Valerie’s dad, the lynchpin of computer installation expertise, was asleep, so my dad won out with the number to Microsoft installation support. After two hours of kibitzing about encountering a new problem never before seen during installation, the answer was revealed:
There were smudges on the CD.
I finished the installation around 7:30 pm. And then I crashed.
I woke up this morning around 4:30, angry at an overly authoritarian itinerant church worker I had encountered in a dream. (He was a good guy, but yelling at the kids is not the answer. Actually, he yelled at me too, for not paying attention. I won’t be working with him for a while… these crazy dreams!)
By 5:30 I was on the track, running my morning mile, grinning at the smells of wild mint and evergreen, glad to be getting up in the morning.
Valerie says I’m a morning person. How little does she know!
neumatikos 
I snort derisively in your general direction and my uncle told you to make sure the disk was ok before you went dialing a whole lot of numbers.
Te amo.
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explain again what your job is about? All I know is papaer pushing not phone answering. I remember when you told me about the opening, it sounded as if a job had been created built around your degree & job experience [all those bank admin. type jobs] but would you mind filling in the blanks.
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btw — you seem to have been snorted at
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I could handle a night shift.. except for that “sleeping during the day” thing. I can’t do that.
those dirty smudges…
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