A Week to Forget
In the history of my life, this week is one week that I would like to Forget. Erase. Delete. Poof. Shaza’am! Gone. If stress would indeed cause gray hair, my hair should be white as snow by now. My outlook this week has been similar to that of Eeyore and Chicken Little. I’ve been expecting the sky to fall at any moment.
Back-to-back exams and accounting projects have been the culprits causing the increased stress levels. The results—less than pretty, for sure. And I even took a day off work to study. Yes indeedy…it’s been a bad week.
I was quite relieved to see the end of my school week by Thursday afternoon. I went to Wal-mart and didn’t even have the heart browse. I just bought the three items I needed and went home.
The lawn needed to be mowed, and I thought maybe a stint of riding the lawnmower and listening to music would brighten my mood. I got on the mower…and the battery was so dead it couldn’t even produce an ignition light. Figured…fit right in with the week.
Martin got me going and off I went. It proved to be a good chance to brood for the first while. I finally began to let loose of my horrible week—that is, until a short time before I was finished when I ran into a cable hidden in the grass that wrapped itself around the blades and stalled the mower. It was getting dark and supper was ready, so I just left it. I just didn’t have the heart to deal with it.
Friday morning, I was glad to be going to work instead of school. At least I know what’s going on there. Not a lot there that I can’t handle…or so I thought.
After fielding the normal razzing for taking a day off, I gladly sat down at my desk and hit the power button on the computer. I was ready…payroll, deposit, orders, phone calls—Bring. It. On!
The computer booted up and prompted me for the password, except WAIT A MINUTE!! I don’t have a password for the computer. It has NEVER required a password. Let me repeat that. This computer has never required a password. It always goes straight to the desktop, and I’m ready to go. A cold chill flooded my body and wrapped itself around my heart. My week had followed me to work.
I interrupted the office conversation to inquire if anyone had set a password recently. Blank looks—not a good sign. I called my assistant at home to see if anything unusual had happened the day before. Nope, not a thing. Rebooting did nothing for the password request. Putting in the two variations of the usual office passwords got me exactly nowhere. I felt ill.
I remembered that this exact thing had happened to my boss’s new laptop and tech support had run him through a reformat of the hard drive without him even realizing what they were doing and him losing everything (which luckily wasn’t much). Reformatting this hard drive would NOT be an option. Seven and a half years of hard work down the drain? I don’t think so!
I’m not sure how visible my panic was, but at one point, Wayne said, “You’re probably trying to remember when the last time was that you backed up the computer, aren’t you?” I hated to admit it, but I was. It was one of the first things that flashed through my mind.
I pulled out the paperwork I received with the computer and started the horrendous process of calling tech support. Wayne spent some time on the phone calling local computer shops while I was on hold with someone on the other side of the ocean. He received responses that varied from “Never heard of it” to “I could fix it in 15 minutes but can’t come until Monday.”
Well, the long and the short of it is that I spent the next two and a half hours on the phone with tech support (probably at least two of those hours were spent on hold) and spent somewhere between $85 to $130 (I got three different quotes from three different people) for a fifteen minute procedure that saved me from one of the biggest potential disasters of my career.
One nice thing is that if you’re willing to pay for the tech support, they’ll give you someone on your own continent to talk to. Understanding Joe was not a problem, and he knew what to do without reading from his list of procedures in a halting monotone. He was even somewhat apologetic about the price I’d had to pay for such a short conversation and a relatively easy fix. He took the time to review the entire procedure verbally again after the problem had finally been fixed.
No one knows how a password got set in the first place. Once I was up and running, the first thing that I did was back up my accounting file. A review of the files on my backup revealed backup dates of which I’m thoroughly ashamed. I had backed it up since then, but to the hard drive where it would have done me no good in this case. Needless to say, an external hard drive and backup software are on the top of my shopping list.
If I hadn’t been in such a snit, I may have been able to think further than the tip of my nose and come up with personal acquaintances that could have helped me for free, but I wanted help and I wanted it immediately! I know that the hard drive could have been removed and data retrieved that way, but I had stuff to do then—not later. For sure, I know how to take care of it now if it happens again.
Yup, it’s been a rotten week. And if I were you, I’d stay away from me. You might get hit by a piece of falling sky.
Back-to-back exams and accounting projects have been the culprits causing the increased stress levels. The results—less than pretty, for sure. And I even took a day off work to study. Yes indeedy…it’s been a bad week.
I was quite relieved to see the end of my school week by Thursday afternoon. I went to Wal-mart and didn’t even have the heart browse. I just bought the three items I needed and went home.
The lawn needed to be mowed, and I thought maybe a stint of riding the lawnmower and listening to music would brighten my mood. I got on the mower…and the battery was so dead it couldn’t even produce an ignition light. Figured…fit right in with the week.
Martin got me going and off I went. It proved to be a good chance to brood for the first while. I finally began to let loose of my horrible week—that is, until a short time before I was finished when I ran into a cable hidden in the grass that wrapped itself around the blades and stalled the mower. It was getting dark and supper was ready, so I just left it. I just didn’t have the heart to deal with it.
Friday morning, I was glad to be going to work instead of school. At least I know what’s going on there. Not a lot there that I can’t handle…or so I thought.
After fielding the normal razzing for taking a day off, I gladly sat down at my desk and hit the power button on the computer. I was ready…payroll, deposit, orders, phone calls—Bring. It. On!
The computer booted up and prompted me for the password, except WAIT A MINUTE!! I don’t have a password for the computer. It has NEVER required a password. Let me repeat that. This computer has never required a password. It always goes straight to the desktop, and I’m ready to go. A cold chill flooded my body and wrapped itself around my heart. My week had followed me to work.
I interrupted the office conversation to inquire if anyone had set a password recently. Blank looks—not a good sign. I called my assistant at home to see if anything unusual had happened the day before. Nope, not a thing. Rebooting did nothing for the password request. Putting in the two variations of the usual office passwords got me exactly nowhere. I felt ill.
I remembered that this exact thing had happened to my boss’s new laptop and tech support had run him through a reformat of the hard drive without him even realizing what they were doing and him losing everything (which luckily wasn’t much). Reformatting this hard drive would NOT be an option. Seven and a half years of hard work down the drain? I don’t think so!
I’m not sure how visible my panic was, but at one point, Wayne said, “You’re probably trying to remember when the last time was that you backed up the computer, aren’t you?” I hated to admit it, but I was. It was one of the first things that flashed through my mind.
I pulled out the paperwork I received with the computer and started the horrendous process of calling tech support. Wayne spent some time on the phone calling local computer shops while I was on hold with someone on the other side of the ocean. He received responses that varied from “Never heard of it” to “I could fix it in 15 minutes but can’t come until Monday.”
Well, the long and the short of it is that I spent the next two and a half hours on the phone with tech support (probably at least two of those hours were spent on hold) and spent somewhere between $85 to $130 (I got three different quotes from three different people) for a fifteen minute procedure that saved me from one of the biggest potential disasters of my career.
One nice thing is that if you’re willing to pay for the tech support, they’ll give you someone on your own continent to talk to. Understanding Joe was not a problem, and he knew what to do without reading from his list of procedures in a halting monotone. He was even somewhat apologetic about the price I’d had to pay for such a short conversation and a relatively easy fix. He took the time to review the entire procedure verbally again after the problem had finally been fixed.
No one knows how a password got set in the first place. Once I was up and running, the first thing that I did was back up my accounting file. A review of the files on my backup revealed backup dates of which I’m thoroughly ashamed. I had backed it up since then, but to the hard drive where it would have done me no good in this case. Needless to say, an external hard drive and backup software are on the top of my shopping list.
If I hadn’t been in such a snit, I may have been able to think further than the tip of my nose and come up with personal acquaintances that could have helped me for free, but I wanted help and I wanted it immediately! I know that the hard drive could have been removed and data retrieved that way, but I had stuff to do then—not later. For sure, I know how to take care of it now if it happens again.
Yup, it’s been a rotten week. And if I were you, I’d stay away from me. You might get hit by a piece of falling sky.
posted by Sharon @ 12:50 PM
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