Back in Business Revisited

I am of the opinion that my little laptop is the most vexing of all laptops. It was perhaps the recipient of an old gypsy curse at some point. It seemed to be fixed -- twice -- but defied all attempts to fix it. I had the hard drive scraped out and put on a compact disk, only for the material to vaporize from the disk. This is the vexing situation I found myself in last night. Only minutes after writing that post, I put the CD in only for ... nothing to happen. My computer read the CD as empty. So either my computer wasn't able to read the disk or there weren't nuthin on it.

Suffice to say, that was a frustrating development. If not for the appearance of Guinevere on chat to pull me back from the ledge, I might have disintegrated with the disappointment and frustration of it all. It took nearly all of my willpower to not fly apart at the seams, and really only a little anger and bitterness seeped through, and for the most part I can thank Guin for helping me keep it together.

Ok, so then what? The 2nd techie guy, the one who scraped the hard drive, runs a Radio Shack store right here in Newport. As you might expect, that very store was my first destination upon leaving work today. I went in, told him the situation, and he took another look at it. Lo and behold ... the disk was actually empty. His response: "Huh. No shit." So I left everything with him because he wanted to take a second crack at it. Meanwhile, I contemplated going to Lebanon to blow off some steam (and blow some money I shouldn't blow), but ended up coming back here and watching some Veronica Mars, Season 3 on dvd (it's totally awesome and addicting). The phone rang twice, but figuring it was either Jen or some telemarketer crap, I ignored both calls.

But then I checked the caller ID and it turned out to be Radio Shack. I wasn't expecting to hear from him, because he said he needed a doodad from home and it would be like tomorrow that I'd get the stuff back. But he looked into it, and it seems that all the stuff had uploaded onto his computer and was still waiting for the command to send it to the disk. He sent it to the disk and it was ready. Huh! No shit! I didn't even call back. Instead I left a dust trail flying behind me as I sped back over there to collect my precious goods. When I got there he even showed me the files. Everything was intact. Whew. What a frikking relief.

And the CD worked. Everything I wanted is now safe and sound here on this very computer. I checked all the files. All the chapters and a few other things are loaded in and I'm ready to fly again. This all has been an irritating burr in my backside for going on three weeks now, but I'm considering it all's well that ends well.

Now, about that foolproof plan for world domination .....