It was going to be a quiet day. I was going to swan into the office, have a meaningful and productive chat about the direction of the website for the upcoming year, and then I was going to get a cappuccino, raise my hand at key points and say "seconded" a few times before going home.
It was a good plan.
It was a good plan that began to unravel as I sat in my air conditioned car, waiting to collect Dan from the train station. My mobile started to ring. I answered, and was met with the delightfully perky voice of the office manager. I cringed. Now don't get me wrong, I adore the lady, she is superb at her job and generally fun to be around but (there is always a but) she hasn't really ever called me to tell me that all systems are functioning normally and that everything is peachy. This call was not to break that pattern.
Bad thing #1 - The modem was cactus.
I collected my human cargo and we drove to the office, inserted the car neatly into a suitable car parking space, installed our get out of jail free card on the windscreen and trundled our way up to the office. We took a moment to rest, we chatted, we sorted documents, and we inspected the latest information packs. Everything was going swimmingly until it was brought to our attention that faxes were not being received. This started the obligatory musical phones dance, with random handsets being plugged into the suspect sockets and my intermittent dyslexia kicking in mid-dial.
Bad thing #2 - The fax line was deadibones.
By this stage I was glaring critically at the photocopier, daring it to start spitting out A4 like a machine possessed. Nanna always said that bad things come in threes. Ever the practical fixit guy, Dan worked his tech-magic and rigged the fax to work on the somewhat obsolete modem line. Bingo, problem solved! And I think this is the point at which we all breathed out. I went back to shuffling papers, the office manager went back to her phone call, and Dan went to work on the computer.
He turned it on.
It booted up.
He clicked on an icon.
It exploded.
I had swivelled around just in time to see the monitor blank out, Dan look perplexed, and the power supply POP! and flash brilliant white. There was a stunned silence. I don't much like silence, so I asked the obvious question.
"Did that just explode?"
Bad thing #3 - The power supply in the accounting machine went ka-boom
And so what had begun as a quiet, sophisticated little meeting turned into a hardware nightmare. Had it fried the motherboard? Where was the data? Had we accidentally run over a plague of black cats on our way to the building?
The power supplies from the SFF desktop cases were bizarrely pentagonal and refused to fit. The one from the old midi tower had some rather ancient connectors that would have quite literally required me to shove square pegs into round holes. The hard drive fitted into one of the desktop cases, but it refused to boot up. This should have been a clue as to the state of it's little silicone brain. Still, I found myself trotting the 4 blocks down the hill to get a new power supply and a new modem, right when I had intended to be sitting pretty at the conference table casting my little vote.
The problem with downhill is that uphill was then inevitable.
The problem with uphill was that it made me forget where I was supposed to plug in the pretty little wires.
The problem with exploding computers is that sometimes, try as you might, they cannot be resurrected.
I inserted the fried harddrive-cum-brick into my handbag, and mused on the thought that it's storage capacity made it essentially an incredibly weighty and unattractive iPod, and wondered if there was any hope of survival.
Alas, there was not.
[preachervoice]And so here before me now rests dear old Barracuda, fried to death before his time. He served the office well, and will live on in our backups. Learn from him, remember him, for although his untimely demise was most inconvenient for all involved, this death should not be in vain! Tell your children, tell the world! save and store your files before it is too late! For once they are gone, there is no backing up.[/preachervoice]
And so, on the basis of exploding computers and phone line fatalities, this little geek wannabe is going into hiding. Every time I go to the office, some disaster befalls an unsuspecting piece of technology. No more meetings ever ever ever. Nup. Not going and you can't make me! well, except for that one, cause that is important, and that one cause there is like, food involved...
