Wednesday, June 01, 2011

Death of a Laptop: A Tech Support Tale in Haiku

One of the mixed blessings of keeping a public blog is that, while you can share your thoughts and activities with the world, your thoughts and activities are shared, well, with the world.  Which is fine, except when the main focus of your thoughts and activities is stuff going on at work.  And your colleagues know where you live.  Then it's best to keep your mouth shut.  Hence my recent silence.  Hopefully, we can resume our normal programming soon.  Because seriously: I love what I do and I like to share positive stuff when it happens. 

In the meantime, my trusty laptop decided to be not so trusty yesterday, which is to say that I re-booted it at 11:15 yesterday morning because it was being "tweaky" and it puked all over my desk and refused to work for the rest of the day.

Two things to remember about me:  1) I'm a geek; and 2) I'm a geek.

Being a geek, I engaged my tech support in the geekiest way possible, which is to say that I emailed my favorite tech support guy with the following support ticket explanation, and the ensuing conversation over the last 27 hours.  In Haiku.



All that which functioned
Now abides, silent, dark
config.sys?  Vanished

A screen, blue as sky
Returns again and again
I search for answers

Access to email
So long taken for granted
Now?  Prayers are needed

Diagnostics fail
No match for this new problem
Behold!  A doorstop!

Flaunting policy
My Carbonite back-up is
worth its weight in gold

Leaving town Tuesday?
Off to great adventures, but
your laptop won't be.

So I'm off to see if I can beg an extra machine off a friend for the next two weeks, scrub it, re-load all my files, and see if I can get it working from the road.    Awesome.