First of all, my HP Pavillion that crashed last week had a bad motherboard. Seems at least 10 of the capacitors had burned! My tech told me it was due to the impure aluminum used, probably to save a penny per piece. Nice. The pc was barely 3 years old.
I had to work on my laptop Thursday and Friday and my new tower arrived FedEx Friday afternoon. My tech was here Friday night and worked until 11pm and returned Sunday. It took hours to get my documents off the old hard drive because we could only boot it up in safe mode, so no bells and whistles to speed up copying the data to the new hard drive.
He was able to recover all my documents and my email address book, but none of my old email folders and messages. I lost many of the pictures my girls have emailed me over the years. We also had a horrible time reinstalling my Officejet because the CD was bad. Thankfully, I found a second CD in a folder and it must have been the one I used to install it the first time. I had no idea they had put 2 CDs in the packaging and I had the stupendous luck of grabbing the bad one. Time=$$ and all this wasted time was costly.
Sooooooo, today I am finally working on my new pc and I tried to make a phone call around noon and no dial tone. Tried my home line, business line and fax line. No dial tone on any phone in the house. Of course, living in Hooterville (not to mention living miles outside of Hooterville), I do not get a cell signal at my home. Never have.
In order to report my phone lines, I had to get in my car and drive towards town until I got a signal, pull over and call the phone company. I got the automated repair line that takes you through all the different questions and actually wants you to go to your phone box with a screw driver and test some box outside your home. What's next? Asking you to climb a telephone poll and test the lines up there? Of course, I declined. Besides, I wasn't home. I was sitting in my MB on the side of a dirt road (watching the county grader grade the road, BTW) looking like some sort of peeping tom I suppose.
Ok. I reported my phone lines and then had a thought. Phone lines out suddenly. Pipeline construction between my place and town. What are the odds? I drove down to the construction area and got out of the car to speak with the flagman and asked him if the crew had hit a phone cable. He gave me one of those looks like I was talking in a foreign language and pointed towards one of the men in a hard hat and said the word 'boss'.
I walked towards the boss, avoiding all the big equipment digging the trench for the pipeline, and asked him if they hit a phone cable. Yep. He confirmed it just happened within the hour. I asked him if he had an ETA for the repair because I work from home and have no phone or fax line now. All he could tell me is that the phone company was on its way. He did tell me if I would come back when the lines were up and give him my downtime the company would compensate me. I was impressed! I told him I wasn't looking for compensation but if he had any way of moving the repair along faster I would really appreciate it.
And I would also appreciate any and all "good equipment karma" my gentle readers might send my way.
Candle for Chuck
