The Aerie
Oy. Why do I like slow computers? Because if it weren't for a slow computer, I wouldn't have gotten any sleep at all last night.
Everything started to go to heck when Buy More insisted on placing a meeting on top of my 4:00 p.m. scheduled meeting with a domestic client. A 'domestic client' is some individual whose home computer I support. I take these jobs largely in order to keep my hand in on that level of computer support and technology - it would be very easy for me to spend all my time on abstract, high-level computer architectures without any remaining idea of how to run a desktop.
So last night i went over to the home of a new acquaintance to help her upgrade to her new computer, in preparation for moving from dial-up to high-speed Internet. And then all heck broke loose...
First of all, instead of having plenty of time to work on her computer (from 5:00 p.m. until 9:00 p.m. when I was supposed to visit Professor Barker), I had to start at 7;30 because of the Buy More meeting. Still that would have been okay.
In preparation for migration to the new computer, the first thing I did was remove the hard drive from her old computer, connect it to the new computer, and copy all the files into a folder on the new computer. I would have copied them by some less drastic means, but her eight year old computer had no network card, so the only other alternative was the floppy drive. When the copy process reached the "My Documents" folder, it said something like "Could not copy file, data error 0x001001" and stopped.
Great.
So I copy everything that WOULD copy, and then showed the client the folder. Her folder was supposed to have many, many document files, but instead it had three Microsoft Word documents, a folder named "p", and a 1.4 Meg file named "box, division sign, box".
Wonderful.
While this was going on, the client was running me in circles about configuring her applications. I'd be halfway through one when she would think of another she urgently needed, and start me on that one. I managed to get her Quicken set up, and made a start on her e-mail (got the messages, not the address book), and then I made another mistake.
She lives in a building made of poured concrete and rebar, and is expecting Comcast to show up next week and install cable Internet service to her computer. She mentioned that Comcast had promised to "do what it takes" to get the cable installed. I said "Yeah, but the engineer could very well show up, look at the concrete walls, and say 'We don't have any equipment to work with that.'"
She became very anxious over that possibility, which anxiety was interrupted only when I told her the bad news about her My Documents folder, at which point she was a total wreck.
So I packed up her hard drive and my equipment and headed home about 11:30, having gotten no dinner, leaving her under a cloud of depression. At home I ate a bowl of cereal while I hooked up the file-recovery software and got it configured. This took a long while for various reasons, not the least which being that the computer I use for these tasks wouldn't talk to my network for some reason. So I broke out my son's computer, which is waiting for me to work on it for other issues. I loaded up the recovery software and ran a couple of test scans, which were not thorough enough.
So about 2:00 a.m. I set the machine to doing the maximum scan, a "surface scan," looking over every inch of the hard drive for anything shaped like a Word file. Since my son's computer was very slow, I finally had an excuse to go to bed: any sleep I got last night was due to the computer being so slow!
As I laid down in bed, the phone rang momentarily - but no one was on the line. I drifted off to sleep, only to be awakened a short time later by booms of thunder. I covered my head with my pillow and tried to sleep, but as I drifted off again the phone rang another time. Apparently the thunderstorm was causing so much interference on the wire that my phone was interpreting the line noise as a ring signal. I unplugged the phone at 2:30 (it has a clock on it) and tried to sleep, but now the thunderstorm was going in earnest, and I was hungry.
Downstairs I ate a second bowl of cereal, monitored the progress of the recovery (10% done), crossed my fingers that the power would not go out (while my malfunctioning support computer is plugged into a battery backup system, I had not thought to plug my son's computer into it), and finally got to sleep about 3:00 a.m.
My wife let me sleep in until 8:00 a.m., and I spent an hour going through the recovered files, selecting which ones were worth restoring, completing the restoration and burning the files to CD. Then I drove over to the client's house, where she was on the phone with Comcast making it very clear to them that they would be installing her service next week, come Hell, high water, or concrete walls. She was, well, not "happy," but certainly considerably less troubled to see that at a good portion of her files had been recovered. I anticipate she will find a couple are missing, and I only hope they are not important.
I finally got into Buy More at 10:00 a.m., inadvertently re-appropriating the hour they had seized from me yesterday. I can only hope that my client is busy enough, or simply tired enough of the sight of me, that she won't call me back repeatedly over the weekend.
Meanwhile, it's good to be back at work where I can get a little rest...
Posted by Albatross at October 5, 2007 10:52 AM | TrackBack