What a Waste of Energy....And Sleep.....

I went to bed angry last night. Angrier than I've been in a long time.

Sledgehammer-smashing-things angry.

And no, it wasn't at Hubby. Although his snoring didn't help any at all, when I was so angry I couldn't even go to sleep.

I kept telling myself, "Let it go, Bragger, there's nothing you can do about it. Just let it go."

But I couldn't let it go. And I couldn't go to sleep. I tossed. I turned. Then I tossed AND turned. I kicked the cover off, I put the cover back on. I kicked the.... I think you get the picture.

Right after I finished last night's blog topic, in which I was so smug about having had the forethought to back up my computer's hard drive because I was afraid it was going to crash, I started looking for a certain picture of Gus that I had been using as my desktop background. Because ever since a certain UGA gymnast disappointed me (again and again and again and again, and I'm not even her coach), I have had Gus on my computer instead.

I hooked up the external hard drive onto which I had so cleverly backed up everything on my laptop, and I couldn't find the picture. Then I realized the folder names looked weird.

Those weren't the pictures from my laptop. They were pictures from the network, stored on Hubby's computer. The ones I still had. Now I had two copies of them. And none of the ones on my laptop, which is more or less every picture I've taken in the last five years.

Gone. The whole kit and kaboodle. Along with every single document on the laptop. I started wondering just what documents were ON the laptop, and then I tried to make myself stop wondering, because I didn't want to know. I didn't want to know what I had lost. Sort of like I heard a man the other night describing losing everything in a house fire. He said even though it was three years ago, every now and then he would still wonder, "Where's that shirt?......... Oh yeah." (He also said his house burning down was the best thing that ever happened to him, and it made me wonder just how sucky IS his life?)

I seriously pictured coming downstairs and taking a hammer to the laptop that I just paid a little over $200 to get repaired. Actually, Hubby paid for it, because he's that kind of guy, but it's the same principle. I stewed. I fretted. I called myself names. I wondered how I could be so stupid. I ...... I think you get the picture.

I tried to tell myself that losing the pictures wasn't the end of the world. In the words of one of my oh-so-wise sisters (and I can't even remember which one said it), just because I didn't have the pictures didn't mean the memories didn't happen.

But still.

And I thought I had been so cautious.

I told Hubby about it this morning, even though I hesitate to tell him things that I think make me look stupid. He sympathized, but he's not terribly savvy about computing and backing things up and downloading and so forth, but he does know sledgehammers. He was terribly glad I didn't go that route, because it would have awakened him.

Then I sat down at the laptop and started scrolling through the folders that WERE there, trying to see where I had gone wrong.

The pictures were there the whole time. IN ADDITION TO the pictures from the network, which appeared first, which is why I thought the laptop pictures weren't there. Along with all the documents, which, upon further inspection, wouldn't have been that great a loss. It's not like I had the Great American Novel on the laptop. Or even my dissertation.

Not that I can open any of the documents, since my copy of Microsoft Office got wiped out.

But it's a comfort to know they're there.

I still couldn't find the particular picture of Gus (it's probably in a folder of gymnastics pictures, because that's the way I roll). But it's there somewhere, and I WILL find it.

I should get tons of sleep tonight. If sleep were measured in tons.

Some Assembly Required - Sense of Humor Not Included......

I will have to apologize in advance to my buddy Maggie and her man-friend ITSam. I am sure that ITSam is the exception to the rule I will expound upon within the confines of this blog post.

Is it a requirement that technology types have no sense of humor? Computer geeks have no funny bone? Network nerds have no tickle box?

A couple of weeks ago, I got some strange message of death on my school computer, something about the LDUEAHN (or some other random selection of capital letters) not being found. Our secretary emailed the technician assigned to our school, because a computer-based school should NOT have an I.T. guy on the premises at all times, no sirree.

When he showed up on the premises a day or three later, he immediately unplugged the tower and said he would need to take it with him. I said something along the lines of, "Can't you just bring me another one?" I explained that it wouldn't read a flash drive, I had to walk ALL the way around my desk and plug one in the back of the unit, and the CD drive wouldn't open anymore.

He looked at me in all seriousness and said, "I don't just have a stash of these to give away." He didn't crack a smile.

Because my unit had been making grinding noises that sounded like a Cessna 182 that would NEVER get off the ground, I said to him, "It sounded so bad I was afraid it was going to take off a couple of times." He replied that there was no way it was going to take off, not with a message like the one I had received.

Well duh.

He unplugged the flash drive I had left in the back and left it on my desk.

A week or two later (or it may have been the next day), he brought my unit back.

He explained that the problem was that there had been a flash drive plugged into the back of the unit when I turned it on. It was trying to boot from the flash drive instead of the thingamajig it usually boots from.

HE unplugged the flash drive. Shouldn't he have thought of that? I actually had the fleeting thought myself, based upon back in the old days when I would leave a floppy disk (remember those?) in the drive and the computer would try to boot from that. Because it said something was MISSING, though, I didn't give it a whole lot of thought. Besides, if HE didn't think of it, I wasn't going to mention it.

He did replace the CD drive, though, and I think I was supposed to give him a trophy or something for it.

Then he explained about the computer not reading the flash drive in the front of the computer.

Have you ever bought a new computer (camera, video recorder, GPS unit, iPad, iPhone, dozen eggs, scented candle, Snuggie, African Violet, baseball cap, jar of dry roasted peanuts) and found one of these in the box?

I had seen them before, and when he mentioned it, I found one in my desk drawer. I had no idea what it was.

Apparently not all flash drives are created equal. The ones that my computer wouldn't read are apparently "inferior" (read: cheap) and the little silver piece that plugs into the computer isn't as long as the "superior" (read: expensive) ones.

This little cord fixes that. You plug your cheapie flash drive into one end, and the other end is the appropriate length for plugging into a USB port.

Huh.

That would explain why I was unable to scan on a flash drive from my printer/scanner/copier/fax machine, in spite of the fact that it clearly had a USB drive.

You learn something new every day.

I wish technology would slow down just a tad, just long enough for the I.T. guys to go to humor school.