Suzy Says

I lost another post, thanks to the terrible internet service. Gah!!!

So you’ll have to wait until I finish throwing a temper tantrum to read my reconstituted post about Christmas.

Sigh.

I’m 34 today. 34 in the queue for technical assistance chat, which may well end up being a technical assistance rant, at least on my part. I’ve spent all day battling the evil PC, which we all know stands for Piece of Crap, and as anyone who has ever had one, looked at one, or thought of one will not be surprised to hear, I have accomplished nothing. Except the fraying of my already frazzled nerves and the losing of what remains of my tiny mind.

You may think the loss of my once resplendent mind is the reason for the chat thing and the queue thing, but it’s actually cheapness and indignation: if I were to actually speak to one of the tech support monarchs, those regal creatures bedecked with pocket protectors and with no need of sexual protection ever, it would cost me $10. And the wait would be 30 minutes.

Of course, the wait may still be 30 minutes, but I can bitch to you while I wait, like letting the gas escape slowly from a Champagne cork instead of wrenching it out, causing an explosion (and a sad waste of Champagne).

You may also be wondering why I’m even touching or thinking about the Egyptian curse of machinery when I have a perfectly good iBook. It’s because the folks who run the website which I use for work decided not to risk their manicures by putting in the Mac language (or whatever you geeks call it). So I have to use a PC for some of my work, thankfully not all of it.

Hoping to get the piece of work done before the moving madness crunch hits on Monday, I fired up the Evilosity and have been suffering ever since. Freeze-ups, error messages, you name it. Everything but productivity. Driven to desperation, I downloaded a software upgrade that was supposed to fix everything. All it fixed was my little wagon, since I got an error message on attempting to install it after paying $60 for the upgrade and am now in chat queue hell with no-one to chat to about my misfortune except you, my adoring audience.

I’m now 23. Is that too old to cry in public?

Update: All the tech support in India couldn’t fix it. I feel it is a personal triumph not to have hurled Self or PC in front of speeding train. I am referring the matter to our part-time tech person after the move. I hope she’s more patient than I am!

My computer has been misbehaving to a melodramatic extent for the past few weeks. Friends and relations, as A.A. Milne’s Rabbit would say, all tried to reason with it, but in vain. I couldn’t email, and posting here was a nightmare, with nothing to say anyway except “My computer still doesn’t work.”

Finally, I located a guy who would actually come to the house and fix it, both solving the problem and indulging my inherent laziness. It took him three hours and two visits all told to get everything working, which, while a little pricey, was not only worth it, but it was also nice to know that the problems were that complex and clearly beyond the abilities of mere mortals. Yet another thing that should be left to the professionals, like cleaning.

So those of you who have been waiting for my response to your emails of the past several weeks can now either look forward to or dread getting them, as the case may be.

You may not be able to get a doctor to make a house call to see a human patient, but you can get one to see a computer. I guess it’s all part of how machines are replacing people. Pretty soon, this blog will just write itself!

I’ve been pretty much incommunicada the past few days. My email suddenly got corrupted, as if it fell in with the wrong crowd at school, and is presently at a corruption level equalling that of the N’Awlins police department. Juvenile delinquent that it is, it completely refuses to work at all. So I have to reinstall it at peril of losing saved messages (including some from Dad) and at peril of my technological stupidity, which is at a level equalling that of any member of the Bush family.

Which means I haven’t yet attempted it, and probably won’t until this weekend, so if you have written to me in the last week or so, for once the old line is true and it’s not you, it’s me. Hopefully all will go well and you will find my words of wisdom in your inbox sometime next week.

Apart from tech issues, you also know that we are experiencing Mo’ Mom. In addition to that, my father’s closest friend Colin W (aren’t I lucky to have two amazing Colins in my life?) has been visiting San Francisco for the first time ever, so I have been trying to be the best Tour Guide Suzy ever since Sunday. Being tour guide is quite exhausting, though at least the weather has cooperated and been sunny and bright. Since Colin lives in England, he doesn’t find 50&deg cold, so he’s pretty happy.

He’s also an excellent cook, so I have been on my mettle producing show-off food all week. Colin and I cook together as naturally and happily as Dad and I did (and Colin and Dad did, for that matter), which was a poignant surprise.

Tomorrow my sis & bro arrive here for Thanksgiving – Colin’s first ever! I know it will be an emotional one, and I hope it will be a happy one, too. I have a great deal for which to be thankful, and having all these people I love together in my home is at the top of the list.

Happy Thanksgiving to all, even if you live where it’s not a holiday. To all of you who read my trivialities, offer your support, advice, and friendship: I am thankful for you, too.

I didn’t get picked for jury duty! Yay! But the system is as mysterious to me as ever. On Friday, there we all were in the waiting pen, and there was an announcement that there was one case scheduled for that day. So they’d let us know as soon as the judge and lawyers were ready for us. Then they warned us that if jury selection could not be completed today, we’d have to come back on Monday to finish it. Two hours later, there was another announcement saying that they wouldn’t be ready to see us that day, so thank you and you’re done for a year.

My question is: what were they doing for those two hours and why weren’t they ready for us? It seems to me that whatever they had to talk about or arrange should have done before coralling us in the pen. Maybe Becky can enlighten us?

At least I’m done for a year or more.

But our iMac is still swooning, so instead of being incommunicado (incommunicada?) during the working day, I’m incommunicado/a after work, when real life begins, which is even more annoying.

And to cap off the annoyance, we haven’t been able to get the repair guys to pick it up and start repairing it. John dropped by their store on Friday with the receipts showing that they had repaired it two months ago to the day, and telling them that it now had the very same problem (black screen, but everything else working fine). They said they’d call about having someone pick it up on Saturday.

John called them three times on Saturday, and nothing. Then we got a call on Sunday afternoon, the purpose of which seemed to be to confirm that there was something wrong with the computer, but not to set up a time to pick it up or anything. So John’s going to call again today.

You would think they’d be kissing our asses and apologizing for doing such a lame job in the first place, but nothing. Unbelievable.