Hello again

Hope you're not expecting a big brain-dump like yesterday's plethora of posts. I'm afraid you've just got little old me whingeing about bloody computers again.

On Thursday my work PC died. I couldn't even get it to start up when I came in in the morning.

This, in itself, is not particularly unusual. The stupid things has died and been rebuilt at least once in the last couple of weeks prior.

Currently, one of my colleagues who sits in front of me is off on her honeymoon. Given that it's really close to my desk, and therefore all my stuff, it seemed like a good idea to use her computer until mine was fixed.

Unfortunately that was a naive hope and her computer wouldn't start up either. So 2 computers down at 10am. Not a bad start.

Since then I've been playing musical computers - setting myself up wherever someone is away.

Technical support did try come to see me on Friday. Unfortunately they got the right floor in the wrong building.

Several calls to the help desk to try to get some traction on fixing something were fruitless prior to this morning due to a 3 day service level. Yep. You read correctly. 3 days to even come have a look.

At 9.15 this morning service level had officially been exceeded. I actually had a meeting until 10.30 so I even gave a bit of grace time.

To say I was a little cranky on the phone at 10.30 might be a bit of an understatement.

Finally this afternoon a man came to look at the machine. I'm not going to even start on his body odour issues because they're not really that important to the story. Suffice it to say, people 4 seats away commented after he had left.

Anyway, in the way of tech support people everywhere, he suggested doing the same thing they did last time (remember, that rebuild thing that clearly didn't work?). Then he tried to blame the external hard drive I use. The same type of hard drive that everyone in my area has plugged into their same type of computers.

In the end, he did a few things and managed to get the thing to boot up. He then left me to restart the machine 3-4 times to see if the fix would hold. Given that every time we do this in our organisation, all software updates, patches and things upload and synchronise, a full reboot can take some time. It took me about an hour to do 3 reboots.

After finishing what I was doing, I decided it might be time to move back to my regular desk (for the next 3 days, anyway). I packed up all the gear I've been carting from desk to desk and headed over.

I managed to log in successfully. Good sign so far. Then went to do the first thing I always do when logging in, I went to start my email.

At this point I noticed that there were some shortcuts missing from my start menu. Then I noticed the missing applications. Like email. And anything from the Office suite (except Publisher, oddly enough).

So back on the phone to Mr Smelly. He came to visit again - about half an hour later. He did a few more magic things and then told me to try logging on again in about 10 minutes, muttering something unintelligible about profiles.

I'm a generous person, so I left it 20 minutes. I went over and fired up the PC.

I'm still waiting for it to finish booting up. I feel like I've basically wasted most of my day running between desks to check progress and restart that stupid thing.

Do you think I'm a little frustrated by now?