bad metaphor

I’ll admit it; I brought a lot of this on myself, and have no one else to blame for my woes. I also know that I have a lot to be thankful for – that I’m alive, the day is bright and sunny, I’m not living in Western Sudan, etc. But I’ve been having a bad streak of luck today, and dammit, I want to whine about it. What else should a blog be used for?

As a student, procrastination is my way of life, so I stayed up until 1:30 last night to finish the paper that was due in class today. Not terribly bad – I’ve pulled many all-nighters before – but I was tired enough that an all-nighter would not have been possible. I finished it, slapping a badly-worded regurtitation of the introduction at the end, and went to sleep. I woke up early this morning, thought of a brilliant (well, okay, adequate) conclusion, meticulously spell-checked and edited all nine pages, hit save, and clicked the print button. On cue, the blue screen of death materialized, its cold, indifferent DOS letters blinking at me in stale blues and grays. “Great,” I thought, grumbling. “I’ll have to re-type my conclusion.” I restarted the computer, only to find another error message:

“SMART failure detected…blah blah blah…please replace your hard drive and back up any important data. Press F1 to continue.”

Sweet; even my computer thinks I’m dumb. I hit F1, to find that all hell has broken loose – GoBack uninstalled itself, the operating system vanished, and the tower clucked at me in an admonishing tone, as if to say “you should have saved your data, punk.” At this point I went crazy from sheer helplessness and Beth had to calm me down enough to call and get it fixed. Turns out they may be able to recover the data, but definitely not by tomorrow, unless I have an extra $120 (which I don’t). This means I will have to type my paper over again, as the prof. takes off a letter grade each day it’s late. Sympathetic people have suggested I talk to the professor and explain my situation, but it’s no good – he’s told us, numerous times, that he won’t accept computer-related excuses for late papers. He tells us to back up our data and keep printing draft copies. I did continually save my essay – on my hard drive that is. I should have saved it on a disk, but really, nobody expects their hard drive to implode. And nobody prints draft copies, either – at least no one I know who is either environmentally-conscious or a cheap bastard (that encompasses just about everyone). My faith in computers and my reluctance to waste paper has come back to bite me in the ass. Much like a pissed-off West Nile mosquito.

After some time, I stopped being crazy, and I borrowed my roommate’s computer to check my email and my account balance. I’m not great about balancing my checkbook (are you kidding me? I can barely balance myself, while walking). I did expect that I was getting low in funds – I did not, however, expect that I had less than fifty dollars in the bank. Which is okay, a little low, but would be fine – except I wrote a check this morning for my roommate for forty dollars, and she cashed it at the bank; plus I went to the grocery store yesterday, and spent $15 dollars there. I’m no good at math, but that means if the checks both clear today, that equals two bounced checks and yet another headache for karenology. asdfhskdlfjkl;sf!!@$

Now I’m at work, alone because Jodie’s on funeral leave – her father-in-law passed away last night, sadly. He was going in for bypass surgery; I’m not sure if he died on the operating table or before. Anyways, the IT people at our school were scheduled to deliver 40 computers today to put in the computer lab. Guess who doesn’t have access to the lab. Yep, that’s right – the only one here at work today. Luckily I was able to call Facilities and Operations to have them come and open the lab. You can’t just leave 40 computers sitting in the hallway, and the IT people didn’t look too happy at the prospect of hauling them back across campus.

And all this because I got up today. Really. If I had just shut the alarm off and kept snoozing, I would be in much the same situation – paper not turned in, checks not clearing, computers sitting in the hallway – but I would be so much happier. How wonderful it would be.

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