The Non-Techies of the World

Well, sometimes, we've just got it all goin' on.

I spent almost 3 hours last night on the net and on the phone with the guru that has been working with me for going on 12 years now with respect to my computers and my internet goings on.

Well, last night's "fiasco" was our attempt to put the printer on the network, along with our network connection. Nothing seemed to work. We finally uninstalled my printer from my machine and tried reinstall.

This didn't work AT ALL. And I sat on chat with Hewlett Packard over it for HOURS today. I missed an entire day of work over it, but I would not have been able to concentrate trying to figure out what the problem might be anyway, so I stayed home for a vacation day. They don't like it when I do that, but this just feels like an emergency. If you've ever gone without internet for a day, after having it for 12 years, well, picture a frantic, fat woman, on her last nerve, hair standing on end (though not much left TO stand on end for pulling it out for hours the night before trying to determine what went wrong!!), and a wild look in her eye--feverishly typing anything and everything she can into the computer, with much pleading and whimpering...well, there you have a pretty complete picture of me over the last 16 hours or so.

Finally, I gave up trying (after 7 tries) and took printer and cords into my husband's office and installed the software, added a printer, hooked up the usb, completed the install, then RE-installed another device changing it to a network printer with shared access.

All of this worked. Then I came back to MY machine, an connected to the printer on his machine. It was literally *that* easy.

Now I still need to know why it wouldn't connect to *MY* computer. Why the software wouldn't install. Why I am now a bald, fat woman with this wild look in her eye..but there you go.

I can now sleep at night. Imagine that? I have an entire weekend to do so.

Oh, and my guru? Happily bows to my greatness, and agrees with everything I did as being the cleanest way to go about it, all things considered, and we'll figure out why the software wouldn't install on my computer later. He mentioned something about Hewlett Packard being a company that basically tells you "It's not our machines--it must be your computer." as well as talking something about pressing the on/off button 35 times to make it crash and accept the network changes. To that, I can only say "HUH?" Although I did try it. Several times in fact.

All of this reminds me of the dude who sent in his hard drive to parse the drive's contents when it crashed, only to find out that it couldn't be saved, and the meltdown he had because of it. I've had that happen. It's going to cost a lot of $ to get that data back.

I'm going to miss that data.