Wendy DeCora.com

First off, shout out to my Airport Express who’s ease of use its making this transmission possible.

I’m at work, but I’m on my PowerBook that, although slower and having only a G4 chip, has a much cooler name than the new Intel-powered MacBooks.

Here’s the setup for today’s Dilbert moments: Tomorrow my work machine (a Dell with dual Xeon processors) was to be migrated from our Novell Network to Microsoft Active Directory. This is a company-wide migration. I should’ve known this would be the portent of something bad when the 16 page document on what we had to do to prepare for this was entitled a “Survival Guide.” The main step that I was concerned about was having my files backed up. My work machine has three hard drives; a 10GB, a 40GB, and a 200GB. I learned the hard way last year to keep the 200GB backed up as it stores log files. I archive files from it to DVD each month. This morning, I intended to pull down last week’s logfiles and then backup all of January as well as archiving my C: drive documents.

I’d been at work about an hour. Files were downloading in the background, I was listening to iTunes and checking a couple of websites, when all of a sudden… BAM! My whole system just stops. No music, no cursor movement, no ctrl-alt-anything. My system does crash from time to time, but usually no matter what else freezes up, iTunes just keeps playing. That Apple software just keeps on keeping on despite the Microsoft OS tanking. But not this morning. iTunes went right along with everything else.

I gave it a hard reboot from the button on the CPU and it restarted.
Got past the main Dell boot splash and then the black screen of “you don’t want to know what we’re telling you with these white characters” appeared with the dreaded words:

Primary hard drive 0 not found
Primary hard drive 1 not found
Secondary hard drive 1 not found

This does not bode well.

F1 or F2 did no good, just around in a circle of “you’re hosed.”

I called tech support and expressed my displeasure. They said they’d send someone “right over.”

I cleaned my desk and my keyboard and recycled and read some journals.

An hour passed.

The tech guy, who’s name I should know since he always bails me out, comes walking down the hall. He doesn’t look too amused. He says, “when I saw your name on the sheet I knew it couldn’t be good.” That’s right, dear readers, my computer has a reputation. It is feared by IT.

He hits a few keys. Stares into the blackness for a few minutes and declares he’s taking the whole machine with him. This is sounding bleaker by the moment. But, true to form, even this isn’t simple.

Rewind to a couple of months ago, there was a virus that went around the network and in order to install the patch, we had to have our machines completely off the network. Which should’ve been easy, unplug cable, install patch, plug in cable, and you’re done. Except my ethernet cable has somehow become jammed in the back of my machine. People tried knives and pencils and screwdrivers, but no one could get it out. In the end, they got central services to come move a heavy metal storage cabinet out from in my co-worker Jeff’s cube so they could disconnect the other end of the cable instead.

IT dude remember this whole issue quickly, waits about 5 seconds and gets out his pocket knife to just cut the cord and free my machine from its ethernet teather.

He takes it and leaves me with nothing but a non-functional ethernet cable and a monitor.

That was almost two and a half hours ago and I’ve not heard back.

I went home at lunch and got my own computer since no one’s offering me another machine here and even if they did, it wouldn’t have all my webmistress software on it. At least my own mac is already set up to do web work. Now if my company would only compensate me in someway for this (as if), because I could’ve just gotten a book and sat and read for the rest of the day.

And what do I charge this time to? IT has no budget codes. Which reminded Jeff of this great Dilbert strip:

Maybe I’ll use my now-worthless ethernet cable and fill in code 39 for part of the afternoon…