It appears it's a universal truth that we have to deal with whichever country we live in. When you need someone to come home to install something there's only one time that they can come - when you're at work. You're totally at the mercy of someone's twisted scheduling. "Yes sir, we can install your cable on Thursday between 9am and 2pm." And then you're at the mercy of the contractor's twisted time-keeping. He doesn't come on Thursday between 9am and 2pm he comes on Friday at 7pm... after you've waited at home all day. Would anyone care to explain this to me? A friend came up with a pretty good explanation last Friday, "It's the 13th, and you're the one who got hit by it this time." Yes I did.
I sat down to breakfast, spilling cereal over my lap, hoping to fire off a few work emails. I only got as far as booting up the computer before the all dreaded 'hang'. This is probably another universal truth: your computer will die at the most inconvenient time. The reaction is pretty universal too."Hello?" Tap tap tap at the keys. "Oh, come on. Open! Close! Anything, I'll take anything from you, just do SOMETHING!"
Like speaking louder to people who don’t understand what you’re saying, at this point you feel it necessary to start hitting the keyboard.
"No, no, no, no, nooooo! Where did all the icons go?"
It's now that the first signs of panic set in. The cursor judders across the desktop, applications stop loading, the screen takes on the appearance of a frozen jigsaw puzzle phasing in and out of this dimension. I imagine there was a mirror of me somewhere else in the universe having the same experience, but probably eating Apple Jacks and not Cornflakes.
They say that in times of emergency skills you never knew you had suddenly come to the fore. I once did a first aid course with the St John's Ambulance but thought that I had forgotten most of it; my instincts didn't let me down though. My fingers spidered across the keyboard, "Ctrl-Alt-Delete, two three, four. Ctrl-Alt-Delete, two three four. Reboot damnit! Reboot!" It didn't look good. Computer Program Resuscitation wasn’t working, the screen was going a sickly grey colour, and I was facing the prospect of not seeing my hard drive again. It was about this time that the remainder of my cereal spilled down my shirt.
I’m usually a big fan of Fridays but there are some days when it’s probably best not to get out of bed at all - I stubbed my toe getting out of bed that morning. When I rushed my laptop to ‘PC hospital’ and the Best Buy Geek Squad guy (yes, he exists) heard that I had to hurry back because the cable man was coming, he just chuckled knowingly.
“Don’t hold your breath, pal.”
I didn’t, but hurried back anyway. Four riveting hours later he turned up... with the wrong cable box. It appears that some things are the same the world over, but call me superstitious I think the date probably had a little to do with it too. Come July 13th I'll be spending the day in bed.
