Long Days

I’ve discovered how long a full day at work is again. I’m accustomed to a nine hour day on Friday’s but I’ve always got so much to do on Fridays that the day doesn’t seem as long. The problem is that I don’t have to do the deposit, payroll, and clean every day in addition to the daily activities so the past three days have seemed rather long.

One thing that has helped to occupy me has been setting up a nice new Dell computer. It arrived in the office last Wednesday but because of finals and my Kansas trip, I didn’t even bother to get it out of the box. So when I got everything caught up on Monday, I set the computer up but, alas, I couldn’t even turn it on because I had no power source for it. My boss said he’d bring a surge protector from home but didn’t remember it until after lunch on Tuesday, so after lunch I got to start her up for the first time.

What a sweet machine!! Everything is so clean and pure and unquirky...until I went to install Quickbooks, that is. We started using Quickbooks many versions ago and have been forced to upgrade it twice with the last upgrade going into effect the first of this month. Everything went fine for the original version and the first upgrade but when I tried to install the last upgrade, it would only request that I insert an installation CD. I rebooted, hoping to fool it into catching on that I had the correct CD in the drive, to no avail.

Now, one of my pet peeves is tech support. Not so much tech support itself (I’m utterly grateful for people that can help me), but tech support on the other side of the world just annoys me. I’ve had experiences with Intuit tech support that have been less than supportive because I couldn’t understand the person on the other end of the phone.

I made the dreaded call and lucked out. The lady that I spoke with could speak very good English. While I was uninstalling the troublemaker (the free Simple Start Edition), we chitchatted a bit. I found out that it was 2:35 AM there, with "there" being India. She was a very nice, helpful lady and was successful in helping me install the final upgrade. If I can speak to someone that I understand and that can help me, I don’t care where they are from, but good English is critical!!

One thing I don’t understand is how can it be 2:35 AM there while it is 4:05 PM here. Do they have half hour time zones over there? It doesn’t make sense to me.

So this lady was going to help me burn a copy of my current Quickbooks file onto CD, but no, Methuselah was not cooperating. It would not recognize that I had put a CD into the drive so she told me that she would e-mail me the rest of the instructions and I could see what was wrong with my old CD burner and finish up later.

I’m not about to put any effort into trying to fix a CD burner that I know nothing about when I can bring my USB drive from home and just transport it that way. I still have to buy some USB drives for work. I will be so glad to get rid of all those Zip disks. It currently takes nine of those to back up Methuselah.

Now the only things I have left to buy to get everything up and running are: several USB drives, Microsoft Office, Streets and Trips 2005, Sidekick 97, a good laser printer...I think that should be it. So, eBay, here I come.

Some days it’s nice to be the only one that know much about technology at work because I can pretty much say what needs to be done, but other days, I’d love for someone else to be in charge of it so I don’t have to make all the critical decisions. If I make a wrong choice, the blame rests solely on my shoulders.