Sunday, April 13, 2008

Ban Microsoft!

A temporary message while I scramble...

Microsoft oh-so-generously sent me some sort of upgrade the other day, which I attempted to stall off because I was in a hurry to read emails before departing the house. But the damned intrusion failed to go away and, ever since, my computer sits in some sort of screwed-up mode unable to proceed. The upgrade won't install, the error code seems unfixable since I lack the tool it wants, and I can't get to any of my subprograms, frozen out by the error code. I can override to shut down, but when I boot up again, the whole scenario repeats again, just as in that movie Groundhog Day. Trapped in a time glitch, or a Microsoft niche maybe!

So I type (yeah, yeah, I'm supposed to say key or whatever) this from my wife's laptop, can't add pictures of course, and must wait till I can settle in for a long and irate session with some Microsoft tech helper answering from his/her distant corner of the world.

I'm too old to appreciate the qualities of computers. Bring back my Underwood!

*******
Two days later. I am back on my own computet, following a painful 90 minutes on the phone with a Microsoft techie, a nice guy named Amul (spelling may be wrong) speaking from somewhere in Ingleshtan. He kept suggesting ways to solve the impasse, the machine kept ignoring him and me, and after six such failures he/i resorted to some surprising trickery to erase my Groundhog's Day glitch. Commanding the computer as "Administrator" (which evidently means "God" to a chip entity), he took my recalcitrant machine back in time to a day previous to the beginnings of the problem--et voila! stubborn download gone!

I guess time travel may be possible too.

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