Office Life Continued…

I work in a relatively small office, with relatively old computer equipment. The company employs no real computer "professionals," so everyone plods along on a 20-person local network hoping nothing will go wrong. Unfortunately, something will eventually go wrong, like six months ago, when my computer was attacked by a virus (nobody had any updated virus-detecting programs&#41 that wiped out my entire hard drive. Of course, this being a small office with no computer professionals, there was no backup of my hard drive. At all. Needless to say, I had to recreate everything from scratch, which took just about forever.

After this episode, four, count 'em, four people in the office had their hard drives die. Just die, for no reason. All in a row. Still, no backup system was implemented by the person who was supposed to be the closest our company had to a computer "expert." Two weeks ago, I came in on a Monday morning to find a black screen on my monitor, as if it had been rebooted. Thinking that it had somehow gotten turned off during the weekend, I rebooted it again, sat down and waited for Windows to start running. Nothing happened. I tried again, and again, and again, then started to panic: I had to read my mail! I had to check the 'net! I had to do my WORK! The computer person doesn't get into the office until 9:00 or 9:30 AM, and by the time he arrived, at least 3 other people had tried to prove their computer prowess and had failed. ("I know how to fix it. Let me try. <tappity tappity> Hmmm. <silence> Is that my phone ringing?" [as they walk swiftly away.]&#41 Now it was ten times worse than when I had originally found it.

Nothing worked. My hard drive was fried. My company had it sent it out to one of those hard drive recovery places who pronounced it Dead On Arrival. EVERYTHING on my computer was lost, including intricate financial spreadsheets that I had been working on and adding to for nearly six months. All my saved e-mails and bookmarks are also gone, which sucks (I mean, who remembers their bookmarked URL's? That's precisely why they were bookmarked in the first place!&#41, and guess what? Though computer problems have been plaguing the entire office for months, there was no backup of any of my files to be found. Now I have a new hard drive with hardly anything on it and a stupid version of Outlook which sends mail but can't receive any, no matter how hard I try. At least my extremely pissed-off attitude helped the company buy a Jaz drive to back up everyone's files. Better late than never, right? Thpt.