Private Thoughts Made Public

Back in the days when I had a girlfriend/wife/partner, I used to get home from work and she used to ask me how my day was. After a few weeks of pretending to be interested, she stopped asking. This is why:
This morning I received from the courier a PC from one of our branches. They phoned me last Friday to tell me it wasn’t switching on when they pressed the power button. I asked them to send me the PC, but they said they didn’t have a box to send it in. So we had to send them an empty box on Friday. They don’t have a pick-up on Saturday, only a delivery, so they sent me the PC last night. I got it out of the box, plugged it in, pressed the power button and…. nothing. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever had to repair a broken power switch on a PC, but they are a bugger to get to. It’s not like putting in some more memory or a bigger hard drive. You can get to the innards of the PC very easily – what you can’t get to is the back of the front panel.
Some PC’s also dismantle easier than others. With some, you can see exactly how they’ve been put together, which screw undoes what, and you can get the job done quickly. Not with this one. After half an hour trying to work out the best way to get the front panel off without breaking all the little tabs, I realise that the top bit (where the power button is) is a separate section of panel. All I had to do was remove the cd-rom drive and I could lever this panel off. Easy when you know how.
So then I could see the problem. The switch is held in place by a little plastic clip which had broken off. The broken bit was still inside the PC. When you pressed the switch, it moved the whole mecahnism instead of activating the circuit. No problem, I thought, I’ll stick it back with a dab of glue, job’s a good ‘un.
Could I find the glue? Could I buggery. Another 20 minutes spent searching the entire building for some glue, and I’m starting to get a teensy bit pissed off here. This shop has been without a PC for four days now, and any orders placed since last Thursday haven’t been processed yet. I have a closer look at the switch. I wonder if I can wedge something behind it to stop it moving? I have a look around the office. There aren’t any centimetre-square bits of wood handy, and a bit of polystyrene wouldn’t be strong enough.
I decide in the end to cut up some cardboard and wedge it behind the switch. It’s while I’m doing this that someone comes in saying “Have you got any superglue?” I discard all the snide comebacks in favour of “no, I’ve been looking for it for the past half an hour myself!” (keeping my cool remarkably well, I thought). “Oh”, he says, “Someone told me you had some.” Well, someone was wrong. Anyway, cardboard jammed in, PC re-assembled and time for the moment of truth. This had better work, otherwise I’m going to throw the whole lot at the next person who comes in the door.
Fortunately the next person was safe, as the PC booted up normally. It switched on and off like a dream. So far I’ve fixed broken power switches with sticky tape, glue and now small pieces of cardboard. What next, I wonder? Ritual dances? Midnight sacrifices to the Great God Dell?
Time for lunch. Relax and breathe.
After lunch, phone another branch and try to sort out the problem they told me about yesterday morning, which I’ve only just got round to looking at. I can’t work out from their description what the problem is, so I told them I’d connect to their computer and see the problem for myself.
I connected without any problem, but could I see their screen on mine? Could I buggery. So instead of looking into the problem with their system, I spend the next two hours trying to work out why PC Anywhere is only showing me a black screen instead of the user’s desktop. I’m on the phone to the shop staff, telling them what to do on their screen. “Click here, select this, tell me what it says, change it to that, click OK” and we keep retrying the connection. Is it the modem speed? Is it the screen resolution? Is it the modem driver? No, no and thrice no. Of course, the situation wasn’t helped by the fact that customers keep walking in to the shop and the staff have to hang up the phone to go deal with them. Bloody customers, always getting in the way of everything. Two hours later and I still can’t see their screen, and I still don’t know what’s causing the error I was trying to look at in the first place. I can’t pass the buck to someone else because there’s no-one else in the department to pass it to.
Grrrr.
Still, it’s not been a complete waste of the day. Just the afternoon. I wonder if the sun is shining? I could do with burning off some frustration on the bike this evening.