Is it selfish to wonder if you are ever going to get a whole weekend to yourself to do what you want to do? This weekend I only lost the one day (today), but it’s still pretty annoying.
Today I spent all day trying to install and configure Microsoft Windows XP on a crippled computer. I say crippled, because it only had 96Mb of RAM… I wasn’t aware you could run XP in that little memory, but it did just about work - although it crashed over and over again. To give you some idea, the Windows Update (which usually takes a minute or two) took something like three hours.
By the end of the day, I got the computer’s owner to buy some more memory, but I’m not totally confident that the damage hasn’t already been done. The Windows file system area on the hard drive has already been thrashed to pieces because of it swapping everything in and out of memory all the time…
One “typical” thing that did happen today was the computer aquiring a virus after about 5 seconds online… I wish the government could do something about it and either fine Microsoft each time it happens, or fine the ISPs for not filtering ports… after installing ZoneAlarm and AVG, the computer was fine, but it’s still pretty bloody annoying.
Anyway - there went my Sunday. Got up. Got dressed. Drove to parents-in-law. Spent all day fighting with chronically handicapped computer. Drove home. End of Sunday.
And here I sit back at home using a really, really shit laptop that I’ve been using forever. It’s a Toshiba 2550CDT, running either Windows 98 or Linux (Mandrake 10) - it’s partitioned with a boot manager.
Just to cap things off, I’m way behind at work and have no way of catching up easily other than doing overtime, which I have already been told by the HR manager I’m not allowed to do. Also, I want Wednesday afternoon off because we’re supposed to be going to see the Lord of the Rings “Symphony” at the Royal Albert Hall, except it’s been so mental recently at work that I’ve forgotten to book the time off… if I can’t get the time off W probably won’t speak to me for a month…. add to that the fact that getting any time off any time soon is pretty much impossible, and the likelihood of going to Midland Fertility Clinic to see about IVF in the next month is looking bad too…
So what do I do? Stop visiting anybody for a while? Resign my job? or just stay here up to my neck in it with nobody to help me? (and there is nobody that can help).
Oh well. I’ll stop ranting now. Time for bed… bang goes a really crap weekend.