Nightmares, various
I have driven Computer Man to the verge of a nervous breakdown.* I had Head Computer Man on the phone today–Head Computer Man and I go back fifteen years or so, to before he was head of anything. HCM knew me before I had ME. The words I have heard most often out of his mouth over the last fifteen years are ‘don’t panic’. I tend to get a little stressed about computers and he now likes to remind me that if I get too bent I’ll probably bring on an ME attack. Yes, fiend seize you, I know. Also, HCM being soothing is like being hit by a runaway train.** However old friends are granted certain privileges, even when they sell and support computers for a living, and he hasn’t strangled me yet either.
It’s been a bad year for the technology in my life. I have referred to this before.*** We reached a nadir yesterday when, while Computer Man was trying to make my truculent spam filter function . . . all my old email files disappeared.
Disappeared.
My hair and Computer Man’s hair turned white in an instant.† What I didn’t know is that when you have your AOL mail forwarded to Outlook Express it doesn’t actually get on your computer: it’s held somewhere belonging to AOL . . . and AOL drops a hamster, or possibly a wolverine, down a random chute occasionally, wiping out all the customer emails in that sector. Yesterday the wolverine was in my sector. All you klutzim out there don’t have to worry (except about me, but that’s kind of another issue): nuraddin@robinmckinley.com is safe. But anyone who absent-mindedly hit ‘reply’ to an old message at nuraddin@aol.com is gone forever. Unless, of course, you resend. But my private email . . . when it was set up at robinmckinley.com it was set up slightly awry, and so I’ve been delaying moving people across. Most of them were still coming through to OE from AOL. And my ass is grass.
Oh yes, and the spam filter still isn’t working.
. . . Where was I? There was a point to all this. The point is that one of the many things going wrong at present is that I’m crashing constantly off the forum. Blogmom has put a thread up about it and the consensus seems to be what I want is another browser. The entire army of Computer Men threw up their hands and shrieked that I want less stuff not more stuff and that if it’s that common an error (I have directed them to Blogmom’s thread) Microsoft will have a patch for it and they’d rather try that first.
Meanwhile, the purpose of HCM’s phonecall this morning is that he and his Chief Tech Wrangler would like to sit down with me and have a cup of tea and a doughnut†† and discuss how to simplify my computer life.††† They say I’ve got more stuff running on my computer(s) than most of their corporate clients. Ah, the unsuspected drawbacks of dilettantism. ‡ But this conversation isn’t going to happen till next week some time, and gods only know when it might get implemented after that.
Meanwhile . . . my lovely, lovely forum, which I was so delighted to have up and running, is almost unusable. Clicking from one page to another crashes me, and replying . . . forget it. At the moment I’m chiefly just tired of the struggle, and so I’m not going to predict what I’ll do once we get all of this sorted out.‡‡ At the moment . . . I’ll read threads as I can–especially the blog-entry threads–and pull out a few comments to use in entries. ‡‡‡ But don’t expect much.
Sigh.
* * *
* It is of course mutual. We could perhaps get out the callipers and decide who is nearer the edge.
** His gift is for sales. It shows.
*** I think I’ve told you that Computer Man and I have a running joke that he’s going to move in. The sitting room sofabed is very comfortable. Or he could have Third House to himself^, so long as he left his mobile on so I could ring him at 3 am at need.^^
^ Especially now that the weight-bearing attic floor job, with the Jacuzzi and the bank vault and all the other stuff building regs now require you to put in also if you want to add a moulding or change a light fixture, isn’t due to start till March.
^^ You may remember, speaking of a bad year for technology, that Third House still doesn’t have a phone because British Telecom says there is no line to the house. Despite it being in the middle of town and all. Maybe Third House really exists in the eleventh dimension–the driveway provides a narrow portal from that world to this–that could make the building work really interesting.
† This looks distinguished on a 30-year-old. It merely looks old on a 56-year-old.
†† I said, you provide the doughnuts.^
^ I don’t eat doughnuts any more. Sigh.+
+ I’ve told you, haven’t I, that the rumour is that menopause goes away again eventually and you may get your life back? As well as your menstruation-free body. So maybe I will eat doughnuts again in the future. The idea of never making honey doughnuts again is very sad. And I’m not going to make them if I can’t eat them. I am not that wonderful a human being.
††† Newly white-haired Computer Man is lying down in a darkened room until further notice.
‡ I also want to know, irritably, why computers keep having increasingly more memory than the entire Olympian pantheon, if you’re not allowed to use it
‡‡ And please do not rush to give me Useful Technical Advice, however excellent. I can’t use it, and my Computer Men are the ones here on the ground keeping me running at all. It’s their game.
‡‡‡ I’ll tell you about ALBION. And I still have Orange Horse pictures to come.
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