I'm Wild About Harry

I am a huge Harry Potter fan. I don’t think that’s a secret to anyone.

The newest, and unfortunately the last, Harry Potter book, book 7, is to be released later this month. Of course, I’ve long ago been to my buddy Amazon and requested that they send me my own copy of the book the day it’s released! In preparing for this great event, I have started reading all of the Harry Potter books again, from start to finish just to make sure I remember who everyone is and what’s been going on in their lives. I am almost done with book 5, The Order Of The Phoenix, then I’ll zip through book 6 and hopefully be ready the day I receive book 7.

When I thought of this plan, it sounded easy! When you get to the later books, I’ve forgotten how intense they are, especially at the end. I was flirting with finishing book 5 last night and I came perilously close. However, after working 11 to 12 hour days, I can’t stay up late to play! It was already midnight and my eyes were slamming shut and I wasn’t sure anymore what was going on.

I closed my book, grabbed my phone and called Ron to say good night before I fell asleep. Let me tell you, I was cutting it close! I remember talking to him, although I really don’t remember what we said. I was just totally exhausted last night.

I didn’t realize how exhausted I was until this morning, getting ready to leave for work.

I am up, showered, dressed and ready to walk out the door. I grab my laptop bag, and my work phone, but doggone it; I can’t find my personal phone. I know I had it since I talked to both my brother Jim and to Ron last night! It has to be in that room somewhere!

I started tearing everything apart looking for it. I finally got smart and just used my work phone to call my personal phone. Luckily, I knew I had actually turned on the ringer last night, so I should hear it ring this morning. Yes, I hear the tinny ring that is my phone! Unfortunately, it sounds like it’s coming from somewhere on my bed, which is a huge king sized bed with a luxurious thick duvet cover now all rumpled on the top of it. Yep, somewhere in all that white fabric is my phone.

I really tore the bed apart trying to find it and yes, it was in the duvet cover somewhere. So, that made for a little bit of a slow start to my day. Put me a little behind, as the dufuses were down in the lobby waiting on me.

Let’s brush ourselves off and move on. I get into the job site, sit down, boot up and start to work. It’s maybe 15 minutes later or so and I get a warning pop up on my screen that I am almost out of battery power and I had either better plug in or save all of my work because my laptop will shut down. Duh! I started to check my cable connections and sure enough, all were plugged in. The light on my monitor that lights up when it’s plugged in was lit, as was the external wireless card I have plugged in to the side of my laptop. If these items are receiving electricity, why isn’t the rest of the laptop? Hey, this is the extent of my laptop knowledge. While I was checking that all of the cables were plugged into the proper places, my screen goes to black. Crap. I again verified that everything is plugged in as it should be and hit the ON/OFF button. The first screen to appear when I boot up is the logo screen. It says “IBM ThinkPad” and in the bottom left corner it will say press F1 to boot up one way or F12 to boot up another. Yeah, right, like I have ever in my life ever contemplated doing something stupid like that! I waited and I waited. Usually that screen disappears after a few seconds and the Windows logo comes on. No windows, it’s just stuck on ThinkPad. I’m scared; really scared. I’ve been through getting a new laptop before and I DON’T want to do it again! (Ok, we never get “new” laptops, we just get ones that other auditors have turned in for whatever reason and IT has had a chance to hopefully fix them.)

I sat there looking at my screen praying for it to change. You know, you should really be careful what you wish for! It changed to a screen that I have NEVER seen before. It told me that there was no date or time programmed. The screen I was taken to had spaces for me to type in the date and time. Cripes, what more can they ask of me?? This is way beyond my expertise! But I sucked it up, and filled in all the little squares and hit enter. Then it was back to the ThinkPad screen.

Then I did one of the things that I do best. I called for help, first from my boss sitting right behind me and then a call to my corporate IT department guru. The guru wasn’t at work yet, as I was causing all of this trouble at the unholy hour of 7:30 am. My boss gave me a few suggestions, such as “try to reboot”. Ok, I might have come up with THAT one on my own! But, I held the button until the ThinkPad screen went away and it returned to black. I waited a few minutes and even rebooted the damn power strip! Then I pushed the almighty ON/OFF button again. It was slow coming around, and it stayed on the ThinkPad screen for a long time, but it did boot up.

I was afraid to touch anything for awhile! But, I got brave and started reopening all of my programs and working away. All seemed well after that slow start.

My guru called me back right after 8:00 and I gave him the lowdown. His response was “hmm, that’s unusual”. You have to know this guy. You could stick a firecracker up his nose and explode it and that would probably be as excited as he ever got. He’s not a Ben Stein type of flat, but more like that painter on PBS with the afro that used to paint happy little trees here and there! That’s our guru! Always calm, always cool and my panicking in no way makes him nervous! He’s awesome to talk through when bad things are happening to my laptop. Somehow, he always talks me through it and never loses his patience with me.

His answer unfortunately was to be prudent and send me a replacement laptop. NO! I don’t want to go through that mess again, as I’m the one that has to transfer everything then! I have put some of my templates, and letters and faxes and spreadsheets on a flash drive, but all of my Approach files are too big to put even ONE of them on my flash drive and I have at least 30 of them on here. Grrrr

So, I had a little talk with my laptop today. It was allowed one bad day. Now I promise to dust in between its keys and clean the screen more often if he’ll agree not to break down on me. We’ll see how this agreement works tomorrow morning. If all is well, I’m telling the guru I don’t wanna be prudent. Let’s throw caution to the wind and let me keep this laptop. This dang machine hadn’t better make me regret this decision.