Electronics Hate Me

Last summer when Ben and I finally became roommates we had big plans for our 3 bedroom house. The front bedroom would be his office, and the back bedroom would be mine. I was also kind of hoping to get a traveling clinical research associate position so I could work out of the house, but that's a whole other story that really isn't that interesting. Point is, we were going to have dueling computers and it was going to be glorious.

We finally got internet and fired up my computer only to find out that nothing worked. Not one thing. At least we still had Ben's old eMachine (do they even make those anymore?), right? Wrong. His too would not start up. Black screen, weird DOS scripts running... pretty much the same thing mine did. So we did the only sensible thing - loaded up the CPUs and promptly went to see the Geek Squad. Turns out we both managed to fry our motherboards at EXACTLY the same time. I'm not real sure how that happened considering mine was slow but working in Austin and his was working fine where he lived 1 mile away from our new place of residence, but the damage was done and we were without internet access. Oh, the agony.

We broke down and bought a Dell laptop from Best Buy a few days later and so far it's been a pretty good little computer. Except that a couple of Mondays ago we broke it. Oh and I had two papers due along with some tests and did I mention that all my study guides and half of one of my papers were saved on the desktop? Talk about ridiculously inconvenient. Lucky for me I saved the paper down to Google documents. Just a little reformatting and I was back in business. This meant that I had to spend every waking moment at the university library waiting to use one of those nasty public computers to do my work while people finished up checking their Facebook status and World of Warcraft games. Annoying.

After I got through the brunt of my schoolwork and tests, I called up Dell only to find out the computer is still in Best Buy's name and we had to register it to us. Of course the lady told me you had to do it on the internet and I had to explain to her again that I couldn't get on the internet because my computer was broken. No worries, we can do it over the phone and it would take 5-7 business days before she could actually help me fix it. Fan-freaking-tastic. I spent another week at the library (and even spent my whole weekend there) and finally reached my breaking point. Back to Best Buy - I needed the Geek Squad.

I explained to the geek er, guy that I was probably capable of doing a full system reset, I just needed to know which CD to put in the drive (Brown, Black, or Black). That's all I wanted from Dell too, but they couldn't talk to me for another few days and I needed my computer WEEKS AGO. The guy pointed out the right one and got me started, then told me I had to push a certain button on the screen to start the process. He would have done the whole thing for me, but then he'd have to charge me. Sometimes the whole damsel in distress thing works out, sometimes it doesn't. He at least let me go on about my business pointed in the right direction. Did I get it done right? Absofreakinglutely not. I managed to delete everything as planned, but I also kicked off the wireless modem and all networking capabilities, thus rendering my computer completely useless. This story has a good ending... trust me.

My dear friend Kim's husband Marc works on computers for the Navy and thank goodness they offered to help! She went out of her way to meet me twice for the hand-offs and Marc got it fixed overnight. It now runs faster than ever and I have full internet capability. We owe them big. Now if I could fix my flat iron....