::tap::tap:: whuufwhuuf ::tap::tap::

Hello? This thing on?

Oh, hi there, culture lovers! What a steenkin' morning. Got in right on time and turned on the lifeline to the outside world, and got an odd, bluescreen DOS message of some sort saying something about corruption and depair and system administrators and turn-it-off, turn-it-back-on-again. So I clicked the power strip back off, then back on, and the normal Windows NT procedure started, with its wonderfully wacky Ctrl-Alt-Del sign-in routine, and...whoa! Another dialogue box, this time telling me I couldn't be logged on to the network, and then another that my personal preferences couldn't be loaded, all because something on my machine was possibly corrupted and making all the other pixels nervous and edgy. No word exactly what the problem was, so I went ahead and did the best I could and got my own station turned on. No e-mail, no access to my documents on the network. Hmm. This is Not a Good Thing.

Did the start up routine again. (Hey, it's Microsoft.)

Same deal.

Decided to run the limited bit of antivirus software that we have local control over, and after thirty minutes of running, it found no viruses. However, three files were quarantined that were deemed suspicious. Those were taken outside and shot, and after cleaning up the mess, I restarted the box again.

Ahhhhh--no dialogue boxes. Grr--still no network access. Someone, like, say, ME, is going to have to call the computer guy and tell him something is fried. Which means that I am going to have to get rid of some of the temp files and cookies and such that signal much-too-much time spent avoiding work. So I did some dumping and cleaning, and managed to find out that although my intranetwork connection was down, I could ease sideways a bit and get on the Internet, thus explaining the ability to post a few things earlier. Deleted the history of that, and then called up the computer guy.

Told him my problem--"Have you tried to reboot it?" (Hey, it's Microsoft.) I allowed that I had, numerous times, and he said he would be right on it.

AN hour later, he made it up to my little slice of heaven and after a few minutes of jiggering and poking at buttons, he had me back in business. Almost.

Whatever took hold of my machine had set all my preferenced back to default, which meant that stupid, STUPID Clippy was back, and my Word document margins were at 1.25 inches, and all my toolbars were back to the stupid way, and all of my bookmarks in IE had disappeared (actually, they were still in a backup folder on the worknet).

So I had to fix that mess, and then I had to go eat lunch with My Friend Jeff^TM, whom I am now full of terrible envy toward, due to his wife having saved up enough money from her freelance work to send him to a one-day outing at the Porsche Driving Experience at the Barber Motorsports Park for his birthday. He got to drive a Carrera and a Boxster, as well as a turn or two in a Cayenne. I hate him very much, indeed. I console myself only by remembering that he was stuck in a group with a monied father-and-son duo from Rhode Island who wore sweaters tied around their shoulders. And he did give me the latest Car and Driver, so I don't guess I really hate him. Much.

Anyway, that's what's been happening at the ranch this morning--sorry to have been so uncommunicative.
posted by Terry at 1:53:00 PM