The laptop remains dead. Why? I brought it back to work, having proven that I don't deserve a hardware geek badge. Ze geeks looked at the harddrive, and exclaimed "This isn't European!".
Which meant ix-nay on the ires-way. The option presented to me was to buy an adapter. On eBay. From Korea. Mmm...no. I turned to the Other Geeks.
See, there's a difference. I always start with the geeks that work tech support. Those geeks talk to our customers on a daily basis, and have at least the semblance of social skills. In the bowels of our office there's a whole other breed of geek, that only speak in BASIC, and firmly believe that graphic user interfaces are for amateurs.
I used to work there, though I've never been able to reach those levels of geekiness. I've moved on to work at Marketing, which is a major faux pas if you're a geek. I've sort of been able to get away with it, and I still hear "you used to work at Networks so you should understand this" at meetings. Most of them believe it's only a matter of time before I show up for work wearing a suit and tie, with a clean-shaven chin. Oh the horror.
So I went down there, maneuvering between full-sized Stormtrooper cutouts, piles of discarded servers and pinball machines. But not really. The pinball machines are in the basement, the servers are stacked against the walls so you don't have to walk around them, and the Stormtrooper cutout is...well, that's actually there.
Which meant ix-nay on the ires-way. The option presented to me was to buy an adapter. On eBay. From Korea. Mmm...no. I turned to the Other Geeks.
See, there's a difference. I always start with the geeks that work tech support. Those geeks talk to our customers on a daily basis, and have at least the semblance of social skills. In the bowels of our office there's a whole other breed of geek, that only speak in BASIC, and firmly believe that graphic user interfaces are for amateurs.
I used to work there, though I've never been able to reach those levels of geekiness. I've moved on to work at Marketing, which is a major faux pas if you're a geek. I've sort of been able to get away with it, and I still hear "you used to work at Networks so you should understand this" at meetings. Most of them believe it's only a matter of time before I show up for work wearing a suit and tie, with a clean-shaven chin. Oh the horror.
So I went down there, maneuvering between full-sized Stormtrooper cutouts, piles of discarded servers and pinball machines. But not really. The pinball machines are in the basement, the servers are stacked against the walls so you don't have to walk around them, and the Stormtrooper cutout is...well, that's actually there.
All your Deathstars are belong to me
They rolled their eyes when I said "Windows". They rolled them again as I said "service pack". They smiled smugly as I said "laptop crash". Then they said "mini OS on a USB stick".
That was Friday. Monday and Tuesday I'm off to customer service for meetings. So on Wednesday I should be rebooting my laptop from a USB stick, and saving the files I haven't backed up. Goodness.
Oh. And I've learnt that in Latvian "Internet" is "Internets". And "Vista" is "chicken". Suddenly a lot of things make more sense.
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