Winding all the way back to last Thursday’s post and my moan about the ailing HD on my PC, the engineer turned up on Sunday morning at 7:30 (I kid you not. I imagine there are some insane farmers, milkmen or god-botherers who consider that a reasonable time of day on the Sabbath, but I’m certainly not one of them, as I made perfectly clear when I opened the door in my string underpants and spat on him*) with a cheery smile and the opening gambit ‘I don’t know why they sent me, I haven’t got any parts onboard whatever the problem turns out to be’.
So I showed him to my boudoir (you will remember this is the site of my ‘writer’s corner’), booted the PC into life, opened ‘reliability and performance monitor’ and quickly received his confirmation that it did indeed look like a FU-rapidly-approaching-BAR hard drive type issue. This whole exchange, including the offer of a cup of tea (declined – I was, in all honesty, quite surprised to find him packing his own tea-urn, strapped to his back like the futuristic jet pack we all dreamed back in the optimistic 70’s of owning in the year 2000**), took no more than a couple of minutes, but thereafter followed a series of increasingly surreal and convoluted conversations with he, directly, and his various superiors, by the magic of telecommunications, where the terms of my guarantee and the contract I had taken with them were discussed at length to arrive at a literal interpretation of the phrase ‘repairs undertaken on site’. It took quite a while for them to grasp that a return-to-base service with a turnaround time of fourteen days wasn’t acceptable, and to accept that their difficulties in obtaining ‘back-up media’ because of Microsoft’s marketing policy were exactly that; ‘their’, rather than ‘my’ problem.
So, touch wood, the man will be back on Wednesday with a new hard drive, and with the assistance of the back-up media Iburned on receipt of the computer at purchase my blue screen woes should be done and dusted. In the meantime, though, I feel an absolute imperative to get TMA06 fully written and saved to a memory stick prior to the engineer’s visit, so that in the event that his repairs F it UBAR even more I can still make the cut-off deadline from another PC.
So if you don’t see any new blogs for a day or two, you’ll know I’m busy with Caryl Churchill and the Girls on Top. If I’m not back by Friday, chances are my pessimism regarding the repair process has proven to be realism, or that at the very least my router has taken unkindly to being hooked up to a new hard drive.
TTFN
:D
* I jest, obviously, for comic effect. I neither spat on him, nor have a door in my underpants. There is a small aperture through which I can extract my member for purposes of micturation, of course, but as this is commonplace in the undergarments of gentlemen it hardly needs mentioning here. Or anywhere else. Well, maybe in the packaging description and/or item description if catalogue or internet browsing. But not here. No. Izzit?
Scientific progress goes 'Boink'.
Winding all the way back to last Thursday’s post and my moan about the ailing HD on my PC, the engineer turned up on Sunday morning at 7:30 (I kid you not. I imagine there are some insane farmers, milkmen or god-botherers who consider that a reasonable time of day on the Sabbath, but I’m certainly not one of them, as I made perfectly clear when I opened the door in my string underpants and spat on him*) with a cheery smile and the opening gambit ‘I don’t know why they sent me, I haven’t got any parts onboard whatever the problem turns out to be’.
So I showed him to my boudoir (you will remember this is the site of my ‘writer’s corner’), booted the PC into life, opened ‘reliability and performance monitor’ and quickly received his confirmation that it did indeed look like a FU-rapidly-approaching-BAR hard drive type issue. This whole exchange, including the offer of a cup of tea (declined – I was, in all honesty, quite surprised to find him packing his own tea-urn, strapped to his back like the futuristic jet pack we all dreamed back in the optimistic 70’s of owning in the year 2000**), took no more than a couple of minutes, but thereafter followed a series of increasingly surreal and convoluted conversations with he, directly, and his various superiors, by the magic of telecommunications, where the terms of my guarantee and the contract I had taken with them were discussed at length to arrive at a literal interpretation of the phrase ‘repairs undertaken on site’. It took quite a while for them to grasp that a return-to-base service with a turnaround time of fourteen days wasn’t acceptable, and to accept that their difficulties in obtaining ‘back-up media’ because of Microsoft’s marketing policy were exactly that; ‘their’, rather than ‘my’ problem.
So, touch wood, the man will be back on Wednesday with a new hard drive, and with the assistance of the back-up media Iburned on receipt of the computer at purchase my blue screen woes should be done and dusted. In the meantime, though, I feel an absolute imperative to get TMA06 fully written and saved to a memory stick prior to the engineer’s visit, so that in the event that his repairs F it UBAR even more I can still make the cut-off deadline from another PC.
So if you don’t see any new blogs for a day or two, you’ll know I’m busy with Caryl Churchill and the Girls on Top. If I’m not back by Friday, chances are my pessimism regarding the repair process has proven to be realism, or that at the very least my router has taken unkindly to being hooked up to a new hard drive.
TTFN
:D
* I jest, obviously, for comic effect. I neither spat on him, nor have a door in my underpants. There is a small aperture through which I can extract my member for purposes of micturation, of course, but as this is commonplace in the undergarments of gentlemen it hardly needs mentioning here. Or anywhere else. Well, maybe in the packaging description and/or item description if catalogue or internet browsing. But not here. No. Izzit?
** See above re ‘comic effect’.