Okay, so there was good news when I got home on Friday--this e-mail, which should have been accompanied by strains of cherubic choirs singing:
Lisa,
We were able to back up data and re-image the laptop. Stop by as soon as you can, so we can have you log back in and copy the data back to the hard drive.
--Jack
However, this morning when I stopped by the bowels of hell, by which I mean the area where the computer tech guys do their infernal work, there was more bad news. While my computer had apparently been healed by the laying on of hands, and my data saved, this morning it was still possessed by the hard-drive eating motherf***er that gave me the black screen in the first place. [Black Screen is roughly equivalent to Black Death in the Windows world.]
[expletives, many of them, deleted]
The good news is, they're giving me a new hard drive, and my data is still saved. By grace, and also by Jack and Jared. So right now, I'm sitting in a little lab in the Faculty Teaching and Learning Center, knowing that I should be grateful--and I am! I am!--but I'm also still a little peeved. Pissed, actually.
Well, anyway, the weekend was immensely brightened by the thought of my saved data. My son and I took a leisurely trip to Wendy's for lunch (I'll say no more about his eating habits, except to say that Wendy's represents the best of them), then to the local used CD store where we found much treasure. He's currently in the middle of a small Ben Folds obsession, and found the eponymous BFF CD (yes, dear readers, he used the word "eponymous"). I found, meanwhile, used copies of discs that had been on my list for quite some time: Juliana Hatfield's in exile deo and the Scissors Sisters. Additionally, CDs I didn't know existed, such as a new Rickie Lee Jones recording; and both Fiona Apple disks I'd been sort of looking for (the new one and the one before that, which I once had but I think one of my kids made off with). We saw two movies--Separate Lies, which was interesting but not fabulous, and Capote, which was both. I wrote a new poem for my writing group. The weather yesterday was sunny, and we got an extra hour of sleep.
To Monday was allotted the backsliding of bad news, and that's probably for the best. To borrow signifying nothing's witticism, I enjoyed The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Weekend.
I'm glad they saved your data. I think it was my optimistic thoughts, combined with Clint's admission that he also doesn't backc anything up.
ReplyDeleteI am completely transfixed with your computer narrative. Seriously. It has that fascinating train wreck quality of all good tragedy. I am on the edge my seat. No really. And you are instantly sympathetic. It occurs to me that this is the "pet the dog" literary device of the 21st century. Formerly, lazy screenwriters would show their antiheroic alcoholic protagonists petting a dog to make them more sympathetic. Now you could show Darth Vader losing all of his data and he'd instantly sympathetic. Vader in anguish, poor guy. All of his short stories down the tubes...
ReplyDeleteSleepy E's comment made me picture Son, in his Vader get up, sitting in front of his Spiderman Pecuter, hitting it with one hand while droning (along with heavy breathing), "You can't give me the black screen, I AM the black screen!"
ReplyDelete