Mr. Scott Really Didn't Overexaggerate

I've been watching episodes of "Star Trek" for much of my life, and I always found it amazing that Mr. Scott could become so bent out of shape when telling Kirk about the engines not being able to take much more, that they only had impulse power, and that only basic systems on board the Enterprise were functioning. Truthfully, I always found him to be a bit melodramatic.

That was until this week. Now that's all changed, because my own home Enterprise has crashed.

About four days ago, my four-month-old Dell computer developed a problem with the operating system, and after finding that Dell customer support focused more on the "customer" side of things rather than the "support," I hired a local firm to do the repairs. I was told that it would consist of backing up everything on my hard drive (which I found out later took three hours), reimaging the hard drive, and reinstalling all of the data, all of the programs, and all of my other files/pictures/music. Here I am, several days into the process, and my computer is operating on impulse power only; my main hard drive (the warp engine) with all of my data is somewhere in Northern Virginia, en route to my house for what should be a rapid re-installation. Right now, I only have a basic drive (impulse engines) -- which, as Kirk can attest, will only get you so far when you're trying to explore the final frontier (in this case, the internet). We'll see.....

Needless to say, this has been a very traumatic time for me: no blogging, no uploading of photos, no downloading of music, no reading other folks blogs, and e-mail availability limited to my drives to Starbucks where (for $3.99 for a two-hour period) I have been able to check e-mails on my small and somewhat dependable PDA. If I was a true internet addict, I would be losing sleep and weight; somewhat fortuitously, I've also been somewhat under the weather for a few days, so I can blame the sleep- and weight-loss on that.

Further updates to come.....

Update 1: So.....the computer guy was supposed to bring my hard drive back between 9:30 and 10:00 this morning; of course, I wasn't surprised (based on the past few days) when he didn't show up and I got no call as to his whereabouts. When, by 7:30 this evening, he still hadn't showed, I called the help line -- and when they teleconferenced him in, I was stunned that his first words were, "Sorry I wasn't able to make it today."

Yes, I flipped and laid into him. This process has been going on four days, I only have half a computer (and it's not the half that's most important to me), I'm getting no communication on anything from anyone, and no one seems to care. It's impossible for me to send out resumes and follow-up on job postings with no computer; he offered to go home to get the drive (he didn't even have it in his car!!) and then come back, but it sounded like it was going to be too much effort. I demanded that he be here at 7:00 tomorrow morning, and he said he would be -- and continued to insist he would be here after I confronted him over numerous no-shows the past two days.

All this from a company that has been in business 21 years and claims in their yellow pages advertisement that support would be at your house within one hour of your call -- yeah, right. I waited a whole day at the outset.....