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I am like
many Americans in a few fundamental ways: I spend...
...about half my waking hours
each week with my family and friends, about 40 hours working, 4 or 5 hours trying
to exercise, and approximately 27.5 hours on the phone with some kind of tech
support.
This is so
that technology can simplify my life.
This time, I
am crawling under my desk in my work clothes before I have to take children to
school and then run for the train. There is a phone wedged under my ear and a
bowl of cereal in one hand. With the other, I am trying to pull a cable from behind
my computer while a customer service rep for Treo (like a Blackberry, but
worse) attempts to diagnose why the computer just wiped out every article I
have ever written and my appointments through next year. She is in Bombay. My
children are in my kitchen. They are yelling for me.
I am
thinking about how my parents both worked and raised two kids with a wall calendar
and a princess phone.
But I run a
website. So right now, I need this lady in India to help me.
“Restart
your computer,” she instructs me through the receiver. It has the reception of
a ship to shore radio.
While
waiting for the computer to flash back up I imagine all the things I could have
done with the time I spend doing things like this.
There is a
sound. Like a toy tractor trying to start. Then, a tense silence, reminiscent
of that moment between a child’s fall and her scream.
The screen
is still black. Now a small white cursor blinks in the upper left hand corner.
“Uh-oh,”
says the “Relationship Manager. You had better call your computer company.”
Exactly what
I am dying to do.
“For your
records, your reference number for this call is 9Y4DF0L…”
Click.
The hold
time at Gateway is announced by a recording to be “less than 50 minutes.”
I put the
phone down as Musak peals through the earpiece, and I make a run for it. Drive
the children the half mile to school, park, take each child to their classroom,
wave hello to a few friends while sprinting through the halls, drive home and
run upstairs.
Still on
hold. Musak. Lionel Richie. Torture.
You are the sun
you are the rain
that makes my life this foolish game.
Soon, a Gateway rep named Mike is on the phone
and up to speed.
“Sounds like
your hard drive blew,” he states matter of factly. “We can ship you out a new one.”
The precious
labor, photos and emails of several years (much of it backed up, thank God,) were
about to be replaced by a simple transaction:
“$70.86.”
In the
coming days the impact of possibly losing so much meaningful information would
become increasingly clear. I continued to hope that somehow, those little bits
and bytes were hanging on somewhere.
In less than
a week, a simple brown box from Gateway was at the back door.
Soon, I was
again sprawled on the floor, along with most of my computer. This time, I wore headphones,
following instructions to install the new hard drive. My computer was naked;
the side panel now being used by my children to slide down the stairs. The new hard drive was encased in a simple metal
box, about the size of an old 8-track tape. To install it properly, I was told
to pry the old drive out; the new one would be pushed hard and screwed. Exactly
how I felt.
And once put
back together again, my computer desktop flashed right up. Blank as Scarecrow’s
brain.”
I often
dream of fresh starts. When I misbehaved as a child, my Dad would offer to
“wipe the slate clean.” I fantasize about paying off all my debt with one
simple lottery check. Of throwing every plastic toy on the playroom floor into
the dumpster.
But this is
a purge of my soul.
Over the
next few days, I spend hours replacing my Outlook Mail, downloading my favorite
browser and other programs. Setting up photos in Picasa and organizing articles
and invoices. We are almost back to normal. I am on the phone with tech support
at my office to re-install my Employer’s remote email program.
And the
screen goes black. With that demonic white cursor.
The next
Gateway “relationship manager” listens to my yarn from beginning to end while
pecking away at a keyboard somewhere. Do they transcribe these conversations?
Waiting to record an outburst of profanities? Threats? Did he know the impact
of what he was about to say?
“Did the
first technician perform any tests to determine whether you needed a new hard
drive?”
“You mean I didn’t?”
“Do you have
the discs that came with your computer?”
What follows
are mind numbing instructions to jam in the discs one at a time and type a sequence
of secret codes. I do not really know
what I am doing because my eyes have rolled back in my head; it does occur to
me that I may soon need the hard drive in my brain replaced.
But now that
I am an expert in changing the hard drive, I am asked to do so again: put the
old one back in. And within a few seconds…there is my old computer again!
Though it’s splattered like road kill all over the desk top.
Turns out I
didn’t need a new hard drive. Maybe what I needed was good virus software. And
a tech with half a brain. The blinking cursor still comes back sometimes.
And since the dissection, my computer has
never been the same. And neither have I.
My Outlook emails are still missing. I’d tell you more about it, but I am on hold
with tech support at Microsoft.
For a story
on consumer nightmares I did for ABC News, please see:
Consumer
Vigilates
Consumer Revenge
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