Well, That Sucked

IT'S ALIVE!!!


Welcome back, Jeremy. Hopefully you had a good vacation.


Wish I could say my computer had a good vacation, too. However, I really can't. But, what I can do is tell some Tales Of Whimsy from Tech Support.

First, I'll introduce you to my newest catch phrase. This came about as the first of my several tech support friends was trying to get me to type "rto" into the command prompt. This is not a difficult thing to do, but when it's explained in the manner that was used, it becomes horrifyingly frustrating. The actual phrase is as follows...and I swear, I am not making this up:

"Type 'R' as in 'Drawbridge', 'T' as in 'Thomas,' and 'O' as in 'Orange.'"

Some of you see where the lines of communication may have broken down right there. I'm all for using your own customized phonetic alphabet, since "Lima" is a little weird for L and I can never seem to remember that K is "Kilo" but whatever. What's important to remember is that when creating your own phonetic alphabet is to make sure that the words you're using actually start with the letter you're trying to convey. When you deviate from this important premise, the whole dang opera just falls apart into "F as in Dogfood" territory.

So what I had to work with was the phrase "R as in Drawbridge" and I went into one of my standard Nerd Sniping shutdowns where I had to figure out what in the blue crap she was trying to tell me. This was not an isolated event either, since I had to have her repeat the request 3 times before I deciphered it. In what seemed like an eternity, dozens of thoughts flashed through my head as to what "R as in Drawbridge" meant, or what she was actually trying to say. I had originally typed "Draw" into the command line, since she didn't explain what it was she was trying to have me do, instead relying on mere letters to get me through. I thought, "There is an R in Drawbridge...two of them in fact," but that just make me wonder why the R was an important letter, because it's a compound word and neither part starts with R. Maybe she meant another word that's like Drawbridge, but starts with R...like...uhm...Rawfridge...Rarbage? This just got me thinking that drawbridges aren't especially common, and why would anybody think to use this word in a phonetic alphabet even if they wanted you to think "D"?

Long story short, my brain shut down for the rest of the afternoon, which was good, because I was only a couple days away from vacation.

Anyway...you may have noticed that my away message said that I'd be on vacation, and returning yesterday. Well, as of yesterday, I still had no computer since the fine folks at tech support still weren't done fixing it. That all changed about 4:00 yesterday afternoon, when I finally (mercifully) got my computer back, with a brand new operating system install, and everything completely deconfigured away from how I can actually use it. So, I'll be spending the next day or so reconfiguring everything back to a workable PC.

And the best part of this whole story...when my computer came back, it was running the old version of Sametime.