Technology Hates Me

Courtney has a quote on myspace that says "I hate technology and it hates me". That pretty much sums up my last 2 weeks.

Home laptop screen goes out. Research to figure out the backlight is the faulty part. Only costs $40 on ebay, but I don't feel competent to take the laptop apart and repair it myself.

Try to call Dell, but they won't even talk to me without my paying $100 for a service call. Find out online that Dell will only replace the entire screen which would end up costing $350 + $100 for service call + shipping.... Decide this is dumb since a new laptop is only $1000.

Consider buying a new laptop, but decide that it's too much of a pain to get all my programs reinstalled and re-sync my iPod. (Sense foreshadowing here....)

Search for repair person.... After about 20 phone calls and 1 computer repair store visit, I finally found someone online who agreed to fix a laptop. I guess "computer repair" does not include laptops for most people. Ahhhh...

Spend entire day backing up my files using Backup Utility (or so I thought - more foreshadowing here).

Go out of town on business for a week, pick up laptop upon my return. For some unknown reason which makes absolutely no technical sense to me, they had to re-install my Operation System (XP) and all data and programs are deleted. At this point I'm kinda annoyed, but feel so glad that I'm so proactive that I backed everything up.

Get home and start trying to reload programs... I'll shorten this part by saying Dell sucks because none of the drivers were sent on a CD when I purchased the laptop and my laptop at this point can't talk to the internet, USB, CD, just about anything. A few hours later I was ready to throw the damn thing in the pool, but Ben was able to save the day and get the drivers going.

So, now I am going to restore my backup files that I had burnt to a DVD. I swear I did it right, not sure what went wrong, but the disk is empty. No content. Not even my resume or a photo. Total dispair. But at least I still have my iPod right?

I must have pissed off God last week, because at this point I plug in my iPod to listen to music and the disk drive is just spinning - loud hard drive failure noises. I try all the reboot, reintall, reset intructions on Apple's website. No luck. I decide that I can just delete all the songs and restore to original factory settings, but when I plug it in, the computer tells my iPod is corrupt and no data can be read.

So all the music I've loaded onto my PC and iPod are now gone. Almost 3000 songs, customized playlists, things I downloaded from itunes.... all gone. All this stress and I'm ready to just hurt something. Isn't technology supposed to make our lives easier and more enjoyable. NOT!!!

So today I'm a little more calm. I found some older backups that had some photos, some old files, and I do have my old CDs that I can re-load if I decide to buy a new iPod. I'm obviously back in business for blogging and email. But I do not like technology that much today. I'm almost afraid to turn on tivo because if that breaks too, I really will cry!