Not To Be Trusted With Knives

Computers Hate Me

November 18, 2011 by Beth

Computers hate me.

First, it was my work computer. It started out when I called I.T. to ask them to figure out why I suddenly couldn’t print to one of the three printers in my office, which are shared among all the staff. It’s my preferred printer to print on, as the other black & white printer1 is at the front where the clerks sit and they often print on labels, so when I send a print job there, it sometimes ends up on a sheet of labels that one of the clerks has just stuck into the paper tray – so wasteful. I.T. told me that it would be simple to fix – the driver was corrupted, so they needed to remove it and replace it with a non-corrupt driver. But when they logged onto my computer remotely, they couldn’t remove it, no matter how hard they tried. A couple of different I.T. people tried, yet the driver would not budge from my computer! They could remove the drivers for the other two printers, but not this one. Clearly, my computer is haunted.

They also noticed that it takes eleventy billion years for my Windows profile to log onto my computer. I usually deal with this by logging on the moment I get into my office, and then taking off my coat, bringing my lunch to put in the fridge in the lunchroom, etc. etc. and by the time I’m done all that, I’m logged on. But the I.T. person said, “Oh, we can fix that.” And then they did a bunch of stuff and it didn’t help at all. In fact, one of the things they did was reset my Windows profile, and the next time I logged on, a whole bunch of files appeared on my desktop. Files that I had deleted A YEAR AGO. Clearly, these files are zombies, returned from the dead to eat my computer’s brains.

So the next step I.T. decided to take was to do a complete reinstall of Windows on my computer, which fixed my printer driver problem, but pooched my qualitative data analysis software, which reinstalled fine, but refused to be activated. Qualitative data analysis software, I might add, which I’m needing for a few of my high priority projects right now! Clearly, my computer is a vampire, sucking the activation-y goodness from my qual software.

Then, just to add insult to injury, the printer at the back – the one that started this all – went on the fritz and we can’t use it right now. I really wish I were making this all up, but alas a truer story has never been told.

So that’s just my work computer. But would you believe that two other computer systems, completely unrelated to each other, and both of which are for Big Important Things I’m working on, both screwed up royally on me? One had a major glitch whereby the work that I did appeared on my end to be submitted back at the end of September but was not received by the people who needed to receive it and I only found this out this week when I emailed them to follow up. The other system first wouldn’t let me enter any of the information I needed to enter at all and then, once I got that fixed, kept giving me error messages that my entry needs to be 1000 characters or fewer, even though my entry is only 995 characters. O. M. G.

How is it possible that this many computer issues could happen to one innocent young lady such as myself? Clearly, this must be some conspiracy of global proportions. I’m pretty sure the spiders are behind it. Or the zombies. Or, god forbid, the zombie spiders.

Image Credit: Comics are by xkcd.com – they are hilarious and shared with a Creative Commons license, because the creator is awesometastic. 

1. The third printer is a colour printer and I only print on it on the rare occasions that I need to print in colour. Obviously. [↩]

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