My essay has been paused; I’ve been given an extension. I
managed to battle on through our thirty-fourth cold (but worst one by far) for
the month, thanks to which Moses missed three days of preschool and looked like
this for the best part of a week:
[insert photo of Moses looking miserable and
puffy]
And Hazel looked like this (only for a day or two):
[insert photo of Hazel looking miserable and
snotty]
And I looked perhaps even more disconsolate because, unlike
those two, I wasn’t allowed to sleep as much as I wanted to, nor did I have
someone bringing me apple juice or stroking my forehead or caring at all how I
was feeling. We were lethargic and had no appetite and spent a lot of time
groaning at each other. But we survived it, leaving me free to turn all of my
returning energy towards my essay! Finally! On Tuesday, Mo went off to preschool, I put
Hazel down for her morning sleep, got my books out, turned on my laptop,
entered my password, was given an error message, then repeated the previous two
steps numerous times with the same result but increasing panic.
During the following 4 billion or so phone calls to a few companies including Microsoft (who
said they’d be helpful only if I paid them $80) and Hewlett Packard (who were
very helpful for free), I found out the error message was a cryptic way of
telling me I needed to take my laptop to a service centre to retrieve important
non-backed-up files from my hard drive (such as my essay) and then install a
new operating system on it, which, I was told, might be difficult for HP to
find and send to me because the version of Windows I had was now completely out
of date, being – HORROR OF HORRORS – three entire years old. (They found one.
It’s on its way from Singapore now, apparently.)
So my computer, including my essay, is currently sitting in
a repair shop in Beverly Hills (THAT’S where I want TO BE!) with a guy who’s told
me that he’ll take a look at it in a couple of days and then let me know how
long he thinks it will take him to actually fix it. Which, when I’d spoken to
him earlier in the day, he’d said would take 48 hours, but then when I saw him
later he said could take 3 or 4 days, and when I asked more questions to try to
work out whether he meant 3 or 4 days from that exact moment, or 3 or 4 days after
he’d figured out what the problem was in a couple of days, he told me he’d call
me later in the week and we’d figure it out from there. “Everybody says
it’s urgent,” he said not-actually-apologetically, even though I hadn’t.
Fortunately MST are also very helpful and three very kind
staff (including the Dean of the college) let me cry at them for a bit before
reassuring me that this happened to a student pretty much every semester and it
would be fine, I could keep them updated, and we’d figure out a new deadline
for my essay as soon as Computer Guy was less vague about actual dates.
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